Bind the Bullet to the Deer

By Author Name

Hearing the jolt of scared animals hiding among the shadows, my mother’s eyes swallow the truck lights bumbling up the hill, ripping through the window. Like a shotgun blast, my father slams through the door, and my mother’s tongue plays dead.

I tell myself I know well the story of lace. My mother stitches herself into a gentle, patient, mountain. Our hillside covered in lavender mums is never longer than the train of her wedding dress. Her mother, an oil painter taught her about waiting through long silences, for moments of great love.

My mother killed a deer once; her first hunting trip. “The way it looked into me with its far away wonder, I knew I’d have a girl.” She says, “I ate the soft venison and my body grew warm with the thoughts of the the high peaks behind our cabin.” She calls the cypress trees her priests. They stand tall and gaze down at my mother at dusk.

To learn beauty through the lack is how music unwinds its throttle. You must be quiet in its breathing, little avalanche. You are secondary. Every knot in a series must say this to its neighbor. If you listen closely, lace sounds like a pack of firecrackers wishing in little blasts.

I was born in the thick wood, behind the priest-trees and arrived quietly into a hush of damp leaves. My father couldn’t believe how I laid my hands on the world like soft snow. He called me, “Tender Winter” because I was like that surprising frost that almost ruined the cherry orchards from here to Blue City. “I always want to look at you like I did that first day,” he says, “but it always feels like I am swallowing a bird.”

Mother likes her laundry bleached and the slow folding of a good stiff napkin. When she talks about the deer, the edges of her face blur and she remembers again the softness of my body measured against the cool alertness of the fawn. Now, I learn it was young. There is always some equation on her lips, that variable of adoration, the adding up of silence.

She lays my hand on the one thing softer than her kiss, the deer’s pelt, a thousand shades of forest, a long road home. Mother says, “This was the deer that showed me our future.” My father liked omens too, and this might have been what bound my parents and burned them too. I used to watch him from my doorframe in his plaid chair, crying and talking to the wind, finding solace in buttered bread and the slow hum of dead images on the television. He missed his own dead things.

All of this weight was reborn in me. I was another root vegetable, born of dark, born of damp. A daughter wants to be glue instead of a bag of feathers. Glue always does the trick. Glue lace to a shotgun and call it beauty. Bind the bullet to the heart of a deer and call it grace.

—

About Amanda Chiado

Chiado’s poem "Armor" is part of the 2019 Visible Poetry Project, animated by Marc Burnett. She is the author of the chapbook Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Entropy, Cheap Pop, Paper Darts, Best New Poets, Witness, Cimarron Review, Fence, and It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart & Best of the Net. She is the Director of Arts Education at the San Benito County Arts Council, is an active California Poet in the Schools, and edits for Jersey Devil Press.