Deer Witch

My daughter touched the hand that tucked her in
and shushed a warning over my “Sweet Dreams”:
“Daddy, the deer witch is out there again.
She’ll try to trick you with her baby screams.
Wa-eeee!” I ask her where she heard such things.
She shrugs, rolls over, soon is fast asleep.

I’m left to ponder such sweet innocence.

The children stranded, left alone, watched through
the frost-webbed panes as she processed six times
around the farmyard with her antlered wand.
Their disbelieving father back from town
threatened the switch until he found the print
behind the corn-crammed crib, still steaming, cloven.

The drunk Joe Kaveny, his wife and child
long gone to God knows where, was found cold stiff
beneath a gnomish walnut tree, each branch
arthritic, pinching at its long-lost leaves,
his fingernails dug deep in acrid mould,
a talisman of threaded vertebrae
bestowed around his neck.

Last week my cousin posted grainy trail
cam footage on his Facebook page, a shape
that shuffles one time through the corner of
the frame, a fell beast heaved on bowed hindlegs,
the universal comment in his feed:
“What in the hell is that?”

Later that night her cry whined in the dark,
uncanny sound: is that a hoof I hear,
an antler scraping on the crib’s thin ribs?

***

Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. He has published poems in The Alabama Literary Review,The William and Mary Review, Pembroke Magazine, SLANT, The American Journal of Poetry, Roanoke Review, and other journals.