Meanwhile in the tree stand adjacent to windmill-80

Clap your hands hard enough for dust to smoke

through your fingers, make a fire in your palms

(call it blisters) take a fistful of sawdust

to line your gums like tobacco, wonder why

it doesn’t smell like wintergreen, clad yourself

in hand-me-down camouflage and Carhartt,

tie your hair back tight so the thing that screams woman doesn’t

get in the way of a good shot. When the lemon

and flame-colored leaves fall, don’t watch

or try to catch them, close your eyes, lace up

your steel-toes, slide the rifle to your shoulder and climb.

When you send a bullet through an animal,

hit the sweet spot on an angle. Smaller

than the width of your thumb,

the lead rips through part of the heart,

liver, large and small intestine

and blows out the opposite back leg.

Her body sprays like a ripped hose,

blanketing a snow-packed field

and she runs. Just enough left to send her

flailing into the crabapple thicket.

She’s one out of 30-something deer

and none of them move, so neither can you.

Try to imagine the warm slick

of venison on your tongue, the men clapping

your camo-coated shoulders.

The blood steams against the snow,

the earth exhaling

a heavy, heated breath.

And the other deer keep eating,

pushing red snow to reach whatever survives

beneath this season of hunger, of silence, of cold.

Consider the taste of black powder,

and the metallic ring still humming

in your ears. Consider what it means

to be scattered here. In this wide-mouthed hayfield,

beneath the tree stand where you are both

life-giver and harbinger of death.

Let your body pepper the crops and stiff grass,

feed the fawns left motherless and the wounded

spike buck you never found.

If you must, bring the hook knife,

scoop your ashes onto the blade so you know

what it means to be severed, stuffed, and reshaped.