Spring Calf

By Brianna Simmons

Children played doctor in the run-down barn

using hay woven bandages to make up for their lonely

hands exploring butter soft skin, only as far

as each other was willing before worry of running

away like a wounded and startled elk,

the first prize dedicated to the Hunt.

The girl named for the Goddess of the Hunt,

conceived and birthed in the flattened hay of the barn,

stuck down with gestational slick like elk.

Spring child born too close to Summer, all alone,

who thought it best to just run

as fast and as far

away as her father’s breath would let her, far

enough that his hunting rifle couldn’t hunt

her, to the point where he’d make his own kin run

for cover of that snow-covered barn

and sit and wait for his heavy boots to thunk lonely

sounds, the same sounds she’d heard the elk

make when he’d taken her on her first Hunt, when elk

were the prize of the season and the pair had trekked as far

as they could before they were two lonely

points connected only by the blood ties of their veins and the Hunt.

She remembers this as she claws at the hay-strewn floor of the barn,

mixed with present thoughts of run, run, run–

but even if she wanted to, her legs wouldn’t run.

Misplaced shot, missed the chest, hit the leg of the elk.

They’d tracked it back to the backside of the barn.

It had fled and wandered as far

as their little farm and then their hunt

was over and all that was left in those doe eyes was loneliness.

Summer child, Goddess of the Hunt had never felt lonelier

than in this moment, when the sound of her father inspired her to run

and leave this chase that he so craved as his Hunt

of seasoned and claustrophobic elk.

She hadn’t gone too far, never back of the barn far.

But she’d let that boy between her thighs in this barn.

He’d taken her lonely, and inspired moans of an elk.

And she hadn’t wanted to run, unlike now, how she wishes for far

as her father hunts her down, his boots shotgun debris against the barn.

Brianna Simmons roams museum exhibits like an anthropological cryptid. Looking for inspiration in every corner, cranny, and cranium, she writes about humans through the lens of curiosity. @bns_and_Bris