by Steve Myers
He’d come down off the mountain by Vera Cruz,
past Kozy Korner and the Jewish Community Center,
tracking the doe he’d wounded, and because
I’d been shoveling all morning, and had hit that rhythm
in the early going where the blade cuts down to asphalt
easy, I admitted I hadn’t noticed the spattering
over the snowbank. Since September he’d been marking her,
he said, when she and her fawns cropped his new azaleas—
long story short, a major buttache, a fucking menace
to the neighborhood was how he put it, roadkill waiting to happen, so with my OK—shouted
over his shoulder—he’d cross my property. Reload.
An English teacher, Steve Myers’ most recent collection, Memory’s Dog, appeared in Fall 2004 from FootHills Publishing. His poems have appeared in literary journals such as The Dark Horse, Ekphrasis, Paterson Literary Review, and Poetry East, as well as in Common Wealth, an anthology featuring contemporary Pennsylvania poets.
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