On a dark desert highway
storm troopers on dewbacks riding by
have shot my fawn and it will die.
Owning it was the first real
violence, though. So that’s on me.
Deer drink deep
the wastewater under palms
behind our property. But, some
where else, luckily, in the swirling
mists of space, white contours of light
shape the Silver Surfer’s abs.
Heaven’s king who keeps register
of everything and never blabs.
These tools are for you to use
me. Like the little birds
who collect along the privacy
fence, we plead and prate about ourselves
inside the colonizer’s non-transferable
estates. Dear Heart, how like you
this type shit? Now my sweet fawn is
vanish’d, lickety split,
and I can hardly breathe.
I seduce you on top
of Old Smokey, all covered in
baptisteries, where I would have thine
grave be white as I can, tho not as thee.

*

Jeff Hipsher’s work has previously appeared in The Boston Review, The Common, Phoebe, Forklift: Ohio, Sixth Finch and the anthology It Was Written: Poems Inspired by Hip-Hop. He lives in Tallahassee with his wife Sarah and their dog, Emma Frost.

Works cited in these poems include The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Andrew Marvell’s “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn,” Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Silver Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience (1978), Future’s “Use Me,” Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me,” and John Ashbery’s “The Chateau Hardware,” “The Instruction Manual,” “The Recent Past,” “Pyrography,” & “Late Echo.”