PROSE POETRY​

SHAUN HOLLOWAY

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ANTLERS

Listen to the old radio as your eyes grow tired. Go outside and follow the moss. It will be easy to spot, like algae in water. Follow it until it disappears, until the snow makes you blind and the world has become a haze of temperature. Feel your bones as brittle structure keeping you standing. Jostle them this way and that as a reindeer comes out from between the trees. Feel its breath melting snow before it hits the ground. Your breath does the same. Close your eyes. Find the way into yourself -- deep in the hills, in your clearing, with snowflakes caught in the velvet of antlers, ice cracking. Think what it would be like to sink into the snow. There’s only you and the reindeer, frost and dirt sticking to its fur, eyes looking at you, it’s cloven feet sturdy, wooden, frozen, and wild.

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Shaun Holloway has an MFA from George Mason University where he taught Literature and Composition. His poems have been published in Miracle Monocle and Slipstream.