The Doe — a poem

The deer lay there for days, unmoved from that original spot. We saw it that first morning, halting in the gravel drive, the deer, a doe, lying in a bed of dew-soaked blades. Her eyes only partially open, a slit of coal black against a soft white and tawny skin. Her eyes faded of any life she had managed to hold onto the night before as she drifted into forever in her plush green bed. Her stomach was an open pit of guts and bones, her ribs caging the leftover bits of heart and lungs, forever deflated, and as I stared at her, I thought how I somehow knew everything about her. Having watched her in the fields of my house, the fawns she carried with her just the day before, somewhere alone in the fields—waiting.

For days she lay there, each day having been unmoved but slowly eaten away by the creatures who only gather the courage for this easy meal at night. As each day passed I closely examined the leftovers, watching the beautiful soft skin of her face be slowly torn away to reveal the rotting brown of bone at her jaw and snout, the pit of her stomach eaten away, hollowing into a pinkish nothing of rotting skin, until one day she was gone. Her body dragged to the deeper grass of the horse field, past the sunken barbed wire meant to keep things in, where to this day I picture the brittle bones of her remains, picked clean and decayed, sleeping peacefully in a forever slumber that can only be achieved by suffering, in a grave marked only by dandelions and her weed-entangled rib cage.

This poem was originally published in Issue 14 of The Gold Mine.