It stands in the clearing we enter,
my father and I, on the hottest day of June,
in a nature sanctuary, forty minutes from our apartment.
So silent and still, my father says
it’s fake, some hollow plastic prop that’ll fool no one
but me—my father, like all men,
an expert in everything
until the deer’s ear twitches and my father, like any boy, starts shouting:
It’s real! You don’t see, no? It’s real!
The last time he saw one,
his mother had just died. He believed it was her. It fled,
and he stopped believing in anything altogether.
He takes a photo with the flash, but the deer doesn’t flinch,
stunned like a word waiting for its meaning.
Meanwhile, my mother is in our apartment, rippling under her migraine—
her damp dark body cooled against the sheets, coiling like a comma.
Like all men, I write about my mother as if she is punctuation:
here only to clarify this world being built. Once, my father’s mother
dragged my mother to the shrine of her cloven-footed idol
to pray for my mother’s fertility, and when my mother tells
her version of the story, all she remembers is the priest
taking another woman inside, and the woman
leaving with her face streaked in semen. How else to say this?
In the end, my father and I, like all men,
streaked in sweat, are just animals,
who eat other animals. This is why the deer doesn’t move.
It is afraid of us. And we are afraid of the deer
leaving, and what we’d do
with ourselves when it’s gone.