Richard Siken

Fauna

There is something wrong with the deer. It is not all right. It has
caught its leg in a length of something. They cut it free and let it go
but you can tell it is not all right. It might never be all right. Call it a
myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a
doubled fact. My stepmother’s father was an Elk. We would go to
the lodge to eat roast beef and watch him butt heads with the other
Elks. Sometimes he would raise a glass in praise and we would clap.
Sometimes he would remember and we would bow our heads. The
Elks fought in the war to end tyranny. They left, they fought, and
they came back. They are not all right. Once, I drove to the end of the
world. It was in Los Angeles. Someone had posted a sign. It read No
U-turn. Parking $5. The beach was nice. I wrote you a letter in case I
died but I threw it away. It was good practice. We have to practice
losing everything. We are deer, we are headlights. We are the road
where they collide.

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Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (forthcoming, Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.