With an eye of oblivion
And a feather of bone
The deer disrupts summer’s heat.

Suppressing its red tufts
Fox becomes an ember,
Able to shift to match the grey earth
Of the forest’s floor.

Frothing, fox lunges.
The deer is a whisper, the way it runs
Into my cerebral chaos,
Puncturing the membranes of dying dreamscapes
With the edge of a hoof.

Fox is canine smell reading carnal stains gone sour.
The yellow of an eyetooth flashes,
A sick sun through veined tissues.

The deer parts its lids,
Secretes from its subconscious
The wet stripes of
Quiet wars.

A twist against rock and soil
And the deer is gone,
Its evidence only in slow red dust.

Fox lopes on,
A warrior starved.

Liz Worth is a writer living in Toronto. She is the author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond and a chapbook called Eleven: Eleven. You can reach her through www.lizworth.com