No one really wants a king anyway.

THE DEER

Outside Pataskala I saw the deer with a soft white belly,

the deer with two eyes as blind as holes, I saw it leap

from a bush beside the highway as if a moment before

it leapt it had been a bush beside the highway, and saw

how if I wished it, I could be the deer, a creature bony

as a branch in spring, and when I closed my eyes, I found

the scent of muscadine, the berry my mother plucked

Sundays from the roadside where fumes toughened

its speckled skin and seeds slept suspended in a mucus

thick as the sleep of an embryo. It is the ugliest berry

along the road, but chewed it reminded me of speed,

and I saw when I was the deer that I didn’t have to be a deer,

I could become a machine with a woman inside it

moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze

and on the muscadine’s flesh, which is almost meat,

the sweet pulp a muscadine leaves when it’s crushed

in the teeth of a deer, or a mother for that matter

or her child waiting with something like shame to be fed

a berry uglier than shame, though it is not like this

for the deer, it is not shame because the deer is not human,

it is only almost human when it looks on the road

and leaps covering at least thirty feet in a blink, the deer

I cannot be, the dumb deer, dumb and foolish enough

to ignore anything that runs but is not alive, a trafficking

machine filled with a distracted mind and body deadly

and durable enough to deconstruct a deer when it leaps,

I’m telling you, like someone being chased. I remember

a friend told me how, when he was eight or nine,

a half-naked woman ran to the car window crying her man

was after her with a knife, but his mother locked the doors

and sped away. Someone tell him his mother was not

a coward. That’s what he thinks. Tell him it was because

he and his little brother were in the car, she would not

let the troubled world inside. It was no one’s fault.

The mind separated from the body. I could almost see

the holes of her eyes, the white fuzz on her tongue,

the raised buds soft as a bed of pink seeds,

the hole of a mouth stretched wide enough to hold

a whole baby inside, I could almost see its eyes

at the back of her throat, I could definitely hear its cries.

HOW TO BE DRAWN TO TROUBLE

The people I live with are troubled by the way I have been playing

“Please, Please, Please” by James Brown and the Famous Flames

All evening, but they won’t say. I’ve got a lot of my mother’s music

In me. James Brown is no longer a headwind of hot grease