When the carcass of the deer first appeared
erect and alive—not in flesh but in soul—
Father told me that the world was ending.
Its antlers grew, rose into the sky, pierced
its heart with its sharpened edges, and we stood,
watched as the clouds bled, pouring dark tears,
unleashing lightning redder, brighter
than what flowed through our veins, darker
than the heavy clouds, crackling louder
than the rumbling thunder like stampeding armies
across a groundless field above our heads.
And I asked, "Why?" And Father answered, "Watch."
But what he meant was "Feel." I felt the pain
of our dying lands, who wept under the wheel
of the first machines, who wept under the smog
of the first factories, who wept and continued weeping
for our bodies so disconnected to their roots,
their branches, their pain, their natural cycles,
and we too wept, because there was nothing else
we could do but weep. And we lay in the middle
of an empty field, in a ring around the skeletal deer,
a god of death that came to visit, taking the form
of a life we had taken only the day before.
But it was not here for us, it was here for the world.
And we carved the flesh from our bodies,
performed futile patchwork spells, hoping
our flesh would mold to the body of the deer god,
hoping we could cover the bones whose outer hide
we had stripped, hoping we could repair
what we had broken and continued to break.

© 2026 Ai Jiang