The Deer at Forest Lawn Cemetery
M.J. Young
aren’t aware of the dead, the leaves & bodies
beneath their hooves, of my grandparents; they
can’t read the headstones. Like the deer, I
don’t mourn the long-since-gone. If I could un-
earth more of their marrow than
fixed photographs, the stories my parents
gave that will never be memories, I would. But
Heaven is where they last now, I’m told, &
I’ve come to Buffalo fifteen years too late.
Just beyond their graves are two deer,
kneeling to pick at the grass, heads bowed,
lives I can love more than my grandparents before
me, more than weather-faded letters. I know
not to approach but when I take a step
one deer opens its mouth & screams,
panicked & animal & human & I am not
quite death to them but in fear they
run all the same, leaving me alone
staring at stone that can’t
tell me if I would have been loved.
Understood differently from the deers’
vantage. I don’t want how I love to
warn of danger, the potential that I, the
x
y
zygote they knew me as, turned out wrong.
M.J. Young is a writer and MFA student at Florida International University, where he is a graduate instructor and the Poetry Editor of Gulf Stream Magazine. He's also a poetry reader for Dishsoap Quarterly. His poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, phoebe, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. In his free time he enjoys listening to Philip Glass and exploring bookstores.
