Self-Portrait as the Last Wounded Stag

1 Minute Read Time

I’m walking into the quickening blizzard 
as if into a hunter’s dream—

the flint arrow through my chest keener 
than earthly desire. Wherever I went

teeth followed me, relentless as the shadow 
of the doe-eyed boy I thought

I couldn’t live without. Long ago, love 
made all gestures of flowering

possible on earth. Now I’m tired of living
on the peripheries where the witch hazels thicken

as inkblots & the light over the hill grows 
more distant year after year. Father, far

& reticent as you are, let me not be a memory 
of blood & musk salting a wolf’s breath.

Let me be antlers. Let me be lightning 
branching jagged into sky. Let me be sky

Gavin Yuan Gao

is a genderqueer poet and translator. Their debut poetry collection, At the Altar of Touch, won the 2020 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Queensland Press in February 2022. They are an incoming poetry candidate in the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Return to top of page

Search