The Deer
Listen. There is only one real ending to this story.
Her: eleven, dog-eared,
a passage someone may not return to, a summer
the color of rugburn the Lord’s Prayer
shivering on her skin
like a plant sticky with honeydew
as darkness licks the room clean,
as she mistakes everything
unmoving for her mother. Hey, Chicken—
Enter Smile that spreads and deepens
like spilled wine, enter Mother a handprint
foxtailing against glass when the door doesn’t shut.
We could begin anywhere: girl stringing together
bedbug bites on her arm with a pen, the dent
in her teacher’s voice when she said you have to want help,
the labels from the pill bottles her mother liked
to scratch off, how she rolled
the residue between her fingertips like a question
she never could ask. But then we could also go to the plastic tunnel
where they lay hair and word-tangled
as if the girl were once again a primitive tug of vessels,
a palindrome of hungers, met and unmet, listening
to the story of Demeter and Persephone,
listening to how a mother could starve the world
to save her daughter. But for this story, we’ll begin with the crows—
shivved with dread, sliding bush to bush
as a baby’s wail scraped through the woods behind her house
making the girl jump over mushroom caps projecting
from the earth like valves on a trumpet,
unaware of the rabbit’s body untangling into song hummed
by the roots, hummed by the bones of the girl
pulsing through the pallbearing trees
to reach a clearing in which only one real ending could exist
but two could be true. In the first, a doe is strung up by her legs,
its insides scraped clean and flung open,
a wardrobe rattling with white hangers
Its head swaying as if it’s drunk, as if she’s drunk,
but when it her black eyes meet hers
she sees the ants trembling in the peel of her neck
In the second there is no deer.
Only the feathered light filtering through trees
and silence dense and cool as bone.