Published by The Academy of American Poets
1st Place Winner in the Academy of American Poet’s Tamara Verga Poetry Prize, 2021
There will come a day when the deer trails will be my trails.
And on this day, I will sink my shoes into the dried tar
with bits of rubber sticking to the cracked asphalt like flesh
to the mangled teeth of a starved coyote. The next day
will be filled with electricity—thunder jolting through my ears,
and lightning traveling through the phantom limbs of great oaks,
tingling its boughs with static burn. My children will tell tales
of a single deer that escaped: a speck of debris on the record,
able to be blown away by a stray exhale. They will wonder if
a fawn might wander into an overgrown, pastoral kitchen:
whether its twig legs will stumble over a fallen, moss topped door,
or if its hooves will be plastered in the powder of primeval tile. They will
ask me if I think that a buck might ram its antlers into the glass
of an old Sedan, its breaking crash a crowing of triumph, to which
I will respond that I secretly hope that one of us might be caught
in their headlights, the blush in our eyes extinguished as a branch
peeks through our ribcage. I will tell them that while today the imprints
from our steps etch themselves into the land beneath us, there will
come a day when a pair of hooves will clear the dusty slate one final time.
Jaden Fong 