Poetry: “Are You Calling to Me, White Deer With No Horns?” by Jill Mceldowney

By Jill Mceldowney | August 9, 2024

Jill Mceldowney’s “Are You Calling To Me, White Deer With No Horns?” brings threads of violence together, a kind of everyday violence that comes from the repeated way that we can all sacrifice our own needs for acceptance, or because we desire affection, belonging, safety, or even love. In this poem, she examines the away that this kind of acceptance can go wrong, and how it can quickly become dangerous. An arresting and rhythmic poem, Mceldowney’s work is full of repetition, movement, questions, and a haunting kind of beauty even as this beauty turns ugly, the poem remains a revelation, an understanding, a moment of clarity on this foggy night.

Are You Calling to Me, White Deer With No Horns?

He’s too drunk to walk home from the bar
so we drive—he insists.
Pathetic, pathetic—
how stupidly wrong, how fast his hand
against my cheek, my mouth when I try
to take his keys. God is punishing us
when the white doe leaps
from the blue ubiquitous pines to obliterated.
His car in an instant
smashed to a twist of hair, metal, bone cooking
on the radiator.
I bit my lip at the moment of impact, bite through my tongue
in the aftermath, mouthful of wine of blood
of nothing when he says Just look at what you’ve done
my blood shouting blood—
who ruined her life?
I should ask
the tangled, unrecognizable what that lurches
on four broken legs
from the fog, from the wreck. And what
can I say
to the way her body fills with our headlights as if to say: follow
I think the path is this way—
Only the doe dumb enough
to throw herself into traffic
understands
how badly I wanted him to love me.
I want him to love me—
I am willing to throw my life away
to get it.

Jill Mceldowney

Jill Mceldowney is the author of Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023). She is a founder and editor of Madhouse Press. Her previously published works can be found in journals such as Muzzle, Prairie Schooner, Vinyl, and other notable publications.