Amy Holman

My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg 

We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard.

The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip 

and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,

either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped 

the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first

to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to

let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction 

of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true. 

We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet 

in those moments of a cold November day, we watched 

a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat 

a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.

Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Review, and Like Light anthology of Bright Hill Press. She is a literary consultant and teaches poetry and publishing workshops.