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Poem
by Anne Boyer


The Dark Deer

My anxiety surfaced on the back of a huge animal
and when it jumped out of fear, a baby deer fell from its womb.

I think one fell out of my bag at the library yesterday,
and I left another in the darkness, coming toward my car.

I screamed and spilled the rest of my beer.
Frank ran to the prostrate form, and he pawed up the ground round his hooves

so as to shower the grass and earth about; relieved nature;
let his head fall; lolled out his tongue; beslavered his lengthy walk

through the woods and using my best salesmanship skills
this dormant hour of the evening increased.

When the deer was gone, he would be filled with anxiety and would lament.
Unfortunately, this can cause problems—

as in the example above of my dog whose claws come out on linoleum
because he is anxious about saving their hides and meat.

The main source of my anxiety was getting low enough on the squat.
For weeks I thought about it and almost fell out of my chair.


ƒ


Many years ago, my stepfather had an accident when a deer ran into his car. He seemed a
little upset when a TINY LITTLE BABY practically FELL out.

Then the city he ruled from fell into chaos.

His followers took to the streets chanting “Vagina this, vagina that. Would you like to
touch my vagina?”

Now, as the teeth are again sprouting because spring has come, men enter their boat and go
out to sea. Snakes fall out of it and my mind runs away with me about what to use those
256 characters to say—

I will marry you when the teeth fall out?

Then the other woman looks and says “Those aren’t deer tracks, those are wolf tracks. She
fell out of the tree.”

But I kept walking until I came to Appaloosa Deer Deer Appaloosa.

“Was it your vagina who killed the deer?”

“Yes,” she replied. “My vagina. I still didn’t feel comfortable singing out loud, even in
front of my family.”

ƒ

A doe jumped in great fear and ran from the river
and a deer baby fell into Kentucky.

Then I forgot the beauty of sex.

But sex is always bringing animal parts to us
and rabbits eat all the shoots, and starve,
and with a cumulative jumping and being afraid
and pleasing and protecting and fondling
the name in general is a word for a room still used
and the young shoots, peeled, are edible in most young families.

The same can be said about a miscarriage, which may be felt
as a house motivated by justice entwined with the horny scales of serpents
like metallurgy or how to cauterize the womb when the bear has your arm.

It has been four years since my first miscarriage,
and I think most doctors agree that there comes a point
when killing “the baby” equals killing Australia.

ƒ

My penis was still spouting, mechanically, reminding me of when, as a boy, there was a
sharp pain and I cried out as Doug fell to the floor.

My manhood had changed!

Where my penis used to be, there was now a furry sheath. I got out of my car and picked
the penis up. My thumb and middle finger were a white-tailed deer.

After the first pill I noticed some swelling and heaviness in my penis. I bowed my head in
gratitude and walked on.

At some point I fell out of consciousness from the tip of my penis to my testicles and
squished in 40 grapes and started to laugh when they all fell out.

After smoking them I dug them up with my penis.

After cocktails, my penis crept out of my pants and around the table. Consequently, I like
to be measured.

ƒ

Say you pick up your favorite deer skin flogger
which you hold just out of my sight
as your cum splashes against the walls
of my non-dominant subject position.

Even though it was made by people
the subject position is not really what makes sex good
anyway. We have discovered books,
partial substitution or metonymic dispersal,

this wild empiricism disguised as science,
and the mask as the dark deer’s pudenda
bestirring itself to lugubrious responses too late.

All my friends believe I’m some kind of nut-case orator
who went psycho in a facade profile whilst I struggled
through the rest of my second year, but as with contemporary art,
when everything is possible, nothing is unwanted sexual touching.

ƒ

Lacan says women try to crawl out of the “rural rut”
and seek to avoid telling the Deer Story itself.
But there’s a lot of deer out there.

Even if you don’t utilize them they die anyway
and over time, they dry out and fall off
as an Indian child is shared by Anglo readers

in that she kept a picture of two deer which I framed
and hung on my wall. Fantasy is a construct
that allows a successful nature image,

the internal organs, carvings of whales, swans, other animals,
which had useless legs sprawled out underneath
and a thing to say as soon as soon as I had gotten it out.

ƒ

The poetry world, so far, seems embittered & in two categories.

You can guess how badly I fell in headlong studenty love apparently ascending bodily to
the disjuncted cracks of my tight pseudo-replicate with a dogged heart.

Every trace of transgression, fragmentation, wounding, happily points out the
composition of deer poop & lacks the confidence or “horse anality” to be dominant
though on the hills its legs fall off especially.