Shame

We came around the bend and bent too,
waists folding left across our seat belts.
The road felt like water under metal
when Mom flipped our bodies to the right
and crossed her own headlights' parallels.
He stood there on darkness.

I took two steps to standing
and maybe ten to where he was
shaking in the blur of shaky street lamps.
His breath was every sound in the night and I breathed
at the pace of his gasping, our jaws unhinged.

My hand reached toward him
as if to comfort. "Where's your mother?"
Hooves clicked unsteadily on asphalt
and the white spots of his body vibrated.
He stumbled past me not seeing perhaps, but I saw
red fur clinging to his shoulder, the desperate
rising of his ribs, the baby's eyes
blind with terror.

"Somebody hit him, Mom!," I cried,
"Help!," but he ran up a long black driveway
and disappeared beside a house.
I wanted to follow.
I wanted my hands to be hooves,
to be his mother, to lick the blood,
lay my neck against his.

I got back in the car and my mother
drove me home with two legs.