From you, torn things.
The stag appearing, suddenly, before the car in the night.
What draws the body from its cover?
Already it turns, stumbling back up, for another touch.
How else to live outside you?
Even after it died, it wouldn’t close its eyes. Even after it no longer had eyes.
I come hither so by this hart thou huntest I may hunt thee—A crucifix hung between its antlers.
The sound of scraping,
of rasping, of others fleeing.
When did my body become so heavy?
Always occupied, always occupying, only flesh and its passage.
All of us moving in the shape of our own hunger.
What drew the stag from the field, what led us here in the first place—
Conversion, a kind of killing. The two of us crowded, speechless, at the edge of what we have ever
known of the world. Our wastes, our foundering.
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That thou dwellest— or the wrong way around. What do we have to forget? What remember? The stag’s human voice. Your bodying forth.
in such a place, everything on backwards