Cheryl sees it first,
a deer as white
as a child’s paper cut-out
grazing with the herd
in the sunset stubble
past the parking lot
where we’ve stopped
the company car.
She points and gasps,
“Where’s my camera?”
John, consulting his iPhone,
says it could be
a very rare albino,
but more likely,
it’s a piebald
with a tiny patch
of brown somewhere
on its underbelly.
The light from the
fading sun is painting
the white deer
yellow and red.
I start to ask what
difference it makes
what we call it,
but Cheryl is digging
her camera out of
the backseat. She fiddles
with the telephoto lens
and curses God
for dead batteries.
My left foot wobbles
in my high-heeled shoe.
“1 in 30,000,” recites John,
still reading statistics
from the screen.
My fingers itch
and stiffen. My grip
on my purse strap loosens.
“What are you doing?” cries Cheryl
when I crouch on all fours.
But I don’t answer her.
My ears twitch, and I
spring over the barbed wire
fence and sprint
into the glow.
Poem by Gwen Hart
Gwen Hart teaches writing at Montana State University Northern in Havre, MT. Her second collection of poetry, The Empress of Kisses, won the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press.