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The deer chews a tuft of grass
but never swallows, and moves through the night like fog. I stand on the edge of the field unable to move closer or further away. I look down and my feet have become two pines rooted in place. The deer rises into the air, suspended— its hooves four black diamonds. My father named this field Arrowhead after the chiseled quartz he found in the dirt, this field on his property line. As a child I watched him kill this deer, then after, smear its blood on my face— a fingerful down my nose, across my forehead. It felt like sweat I couldn’t wipe away. On the other side of the clearcut, smoke rises, the small field center-lit with droplets of dew. Fire starts on the tree line, frames the deer, backlit beneath the moon. The fire burns but never spreads, hovering like a knife of sunrise behind the trees. I can’t see my father, but I know the shot will be fired, the cocked rifle always against his shoulder. I want to yell at the deer to run but my mouth is full of leaves. The deer finally drops from the air. Roots of bone grow from its head, then fall to the ground with no sound. The antlers plant themselves in the wet earth and glow underground like veins of lightning. When the deer shakes its coat, ash falls and hangs in the air longer than it should like a dirty halo. The fire smells clean like rain. |
About This Unit: Poems on Family and Finding Other Lines of Symmetry |
WILLIAM FARGASON is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), and the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, the Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity and the Offing. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida.
