The Deep

Anne Boyer is my favorite poet.

The truth is, maybe, that I have many favorite poets. But Anne is the latest of them. She is all the rage at the moment, at my house. Again.

My anxiety surfaced on the back of a huge animal
and when it jumped out of fear, a baby deer fell from its womb.

I think one fell out of my bag at the library yesterday,
and I left another in the darkness, coming toward my car.

I screamed and spilled the rest of my beer.*

&

A doe jumped in great fear and ran from the river
and a deer baby fell into Kentucky.

Then I forgot the beauty of sex.

But sex is always bringing animal parts to us
and rabbits eat all the shoots, and starve,
and with a cumulative jumping and being afraid
and pleasing and protecting and fondling
the name in general is a word for a room still used
and the young shoots, peeled, are edible in most young families.*

&

We can't afford
raving about clean fresh philosophy.

As a method of debridement
I imprinted on hard when I was a kid.

I typed "Katie's Grace" into doll, dolls,
costume, costumes, fairy, fairies, wing, wings.

I miss that a lot in the Serb language.

I actually like Katie
lumping Russians and Jews

(they get all the airtime on cable).**

There are 5 poems in the deep, & it is decorated with toothy fish & endorsed by Abe Lincoln. I could quote the whole chapbook here, but will not, & so you're just gonna have to wish hard that her book A Romance of Happy Workers from Coffee House comes out a lot faster than promised. Or maybe she still has some copies of The Deep, but there were not that many, not nearly enough.

I watched a National Geographic special about sharks & dolphins yesterday too, which was great, but not as great as these 5 poems.

* From "The Dark Deer"
** From "Poem for Katie"