The days keep breaking, though I wish they wouldn’t,
pale flood of sun breaching the cracked levee of my
restless sleep, washing me out of bed to shut the door.

Then a stag appears, another, the velvet nap of their antlers
gilded by a morning working itself to full glow, asserting
the sort of bright, quiet beauty I'm trying so hard to ignore.

One swivels a cupped ear, cocks his head toward where
I stand rapt at the door, black planet of his eye fixed on
mine, holding us in orbit, and just as I feel my resistance

to the day start to crumble like every brittle dam I build
against this life, he's off, stubbed tail switching up
the street beyond the reach of my naked hope.

The world draws a bead, lays one keen eye on me, weary
and hard-hearted at the dawn of another unbearable day
and I thaw, bear it, stand bare-skinned and quivering

in the doorframe just to love unrequited, hold wanting
in my outstretched palm like a fat apple, offer it up
to anyone who can make me move toward the light.

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Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosa pines in Prescott, Arizona. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, RockPaperPoem, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, Plainsongs, About Place, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades, and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

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