12/10/2020 POETRY: JESSICA BEBENEKDEER I wanted to write a poem about a deer but by the time I got around to it, I think it was probably already dead. I guess that makes this an elegy. I watched it through the chain-link fence with my fingers clawed around the diamond-outline of its metal- etched body, darting through the crooks of electrical towers. No, he was a stag, big, with antlers, and with ink- deep eyes that I could look into and I would feel them like he was looking into me and not bleating with his eyes shut. He kept reeling around on his two back legs and his soft browns looked grey like the grass and the pile of concrete cylinders to the right. His nose kept spraying out these puffs of hot sleet and there was all this steam coming off his back. I could see the meat pulsing around his bones. I wanted to call someone to catch him, help him, or—I wanted to grab someone’s arms hard and tell them he needed help. I wanted to press my palms flat on his wet, shaking body. I wanted to help him. Instead, I watched him smack his hooves off a path of broken asphalt slabs and disappear down the drooping rows of thick black cables. Previously published in The Rusty Toque, Nov. 2013 Jessica Bebenek is a writer, bookmaker, & interdisciplinary artist living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Her creative work can be found in PRISM, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc, and Grain, among other places. Her third poetry chapbook, Fourth Walk, was published by Desert Pets Press in 2017, and her collection of knitting patterns for poems, k2tog, was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press in 2019. She works as a writer, teacher, and bookmaker, and is currently completing a full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There.
@notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art |
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