Two Poems
by Donovan Borger
Self-Portrait as Runt
On the edge of a meadow an albino stag stands radiant,
like some forest god sewed it
from washed roots and white petals
or the snow grew tired of having only one
season, so it took a form that would last.
When it leaps, it travels back
fifteen years, to when the house across the street from
my elementary school hung deer upside-down from its trees,
the bucks gutted but not yet skinned,
drying like swings after rain. I catch
only glimpses of what I felt was taken from me
on the days the trees were empty.
The stag bolts into a night years later when my friend hit a deer while
driving me home. We swerved to a stop, and I heard the deer
grunt and huff, kicking itself off the ground. My friend
burst out his door after it, his hunting knife in hand.
The deer ran a broken-bone sprint, but it was the hunting knife or nature
because half-shattered isn’t a thunderclap we outrun.
Not wanting the headlights to slowly surface
the back of his shirt as he dragged the deer,
already field dressed, to the pickup keeps me
from visiting Stewart’s when the whole town gathers
at 4 a.m. for the first day of hunting season, their breath campfire
smoke rising toward the still-dark sky, their trucks left running
under the thrumming halogen lights of the gas station canopy
while they amble inside to buy coffee and swap stories before
hours of stillness and silence and cold. I want to stand outside
and smoke with them, but I’ve never pulled a rifle’s trigger
while aiming so precisely at a heart. I’ve never known
that deep-chest thrill Adam must have felt when his arrow
felled a deer the day after he was barred from the Garden.
What I’m saying is there has never been a dinner
my family prayed over that I drove home in a tarp,
still steaming in the November air. I want to take
a hunting knife and unzip myself to augur why
any gun I owned would be unable to fire bullets.
The Gambler
He pulled into the gas station straight from work, when the sun was still up, but now the canopy
lights cast shadows across his truck’s dash. He rocks the quarter between his fingers and brushes
the shavings with the side of his palm. The clean slate tells him his numbers aren’t winners, so he
tears that ticket from the others, tosses it on the stack in the dark of his passengers seat and starts
the next. The tips of his thumb and index finger are the color of blued steel.
He spins the quarter as he goes until he’s used the whole edge, then he wipes it along the threads
of his jeans to refill the luck. A truck with an open trailer carrying lawnmowers pulls in, its back
wheel clattering over the metal cover to the tanks, and the air smells like the only tree left in a
field, laced with sharp gasoline fumes. By the gas station door, a man and woman take drags
from their cigarettes, the tips fluttering like the red hearts of birds. He keeps his window cracked
open. He places a $10 winner on the dash.
•
Dollar and Dream are bad names for salt licks, but here he is hauling them at his sides, telling
himself they’re for the deer, and the deer will come.
•
His hands the dry red earth
crack cracked
the salt, dried earth he can it
cracked
buttes
rising up dissolving into gravel rising
shovels, tallest in the world
fingers to hold up the sky before it crashes down like ocean
and (he, he) drowns
The sound
of chatter wakes him. Drink between his legs, half-scratched ticket in his lap. He realizes he
nodded off. Then he realizes he’s still in a beat-up truck in the woods of New York. The clock
says 9:30. He should go home, he thinks, but instead he goes into the gas station.
•
Get enough to keep going?
Some. A few. I’m grabbing another beer.
So that’s 10, 2, 50, nice, and 5. So $67.
Okay, let me get five of the $1s, one of each, I guess, three $5s, two $10s, no, actually
three, and one $20.
This one?
No, the one on the right.
Okay.
I have to keep trimming that roll down. There’s a big one in it near the end. I’m feeling it.
Sure. So that’ll be...$5.50 with the beer.
I’ll take another $20.
•
He’s halfway between the gas station door and his truck when a car pulls into the parking lot. He
looks at it as it moves by him, and in the back seat he sees his older son. They make eye contact,
but the car is pulling into a spot and he’s at the door of his truck, and nothing else passes
between them.
•
He scans over the ticket again to be sure he didn’t miss anything, but he didn’t. There isn’t an A
in his letters. He needs three words to win something, but he only has WHOLE and WEST. He
doesn’t have:
STAR
APPROACH
ALTAR
ARBOR
CARRY
ABLE
ALMOST
Almost $5,000. Most losing tickets make him feel like the numbers just weren’t there for him.
Failed crosswords feel like his fault. If he remembered an A, he’d be pulling out of the parking
lot already and making plans to pick the prize up the next day. He puts the ticket under his
windshield for now anyway and sips his beer. Canis Major trails Orion across the vault above
him. He leans over his steering wheel to get a better look at the Dog with its back in the waters of
the Milky Way, though here the starry river is only a light bruising in the sky. The glass in front
of his nose unfurls a white veil, then draws it back in, out and in, further and further, until the fog
grows too large for him to see the stars without moving. He sits back, opens his phone, and
googles images for Milky Way Arizona. The bright arch in the pictures cracks across the sky like
a nacre gate, like God might pull it open in the night and lower His foot to the desert. The
gambler was there once, on vacation as a kid. It’s the only place he’s been where the sky washes
horizon to horizon, and when he looked at all that expanse his chest tightened, and he felt like he
couldn’t breathe. Now he dreams about moving there, about feeling that small again.
•
By 10pm he’s out $160, so he quits for the night. The pile in the seat is big enough to rubber
band, so he takes one from the glove compartment and loops it around the stack twice and puts
the stack behind the seats to stash with the others for tax season. The clear seat makes him
uneasy. He decides he’ll stop by on the way to work tomorrow to get a couple tickets to have
something in it. But tomorrow’s the day, anyhow. Tomorrow’s the day he gets the one he’s
looking for, he thinks.
Donovan Borger is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University and College Prize and a Fulbright Scholarship. His work can be found online at Swamp Ape Review and in print in Sugared Water and The Common.