Landscape with Deer, Mites, and Aircraft

← v17n1, Spring 2018

Because the Lord loved beauty

more even than obedience he made

the mite. Seen under microscope

the mite becomes a pageant queen,

its shell a slick and dazzling array

of pattern and color. Seen this close

everything becomes a body,

the convex lens revealing order

even in the bedbugs, even in despised

yellow jackets and forgotten mayflies.

From a plane once at descent

I saw a herd of deer in snow

gnawing bark. I was hungry like that,

shucking my own skin, like elks

in velvet, rubbing the bloodied skin

from their own horns.

nature science

Nancy Reddy

Nancy Reddy is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and the chapbook Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems , The Iowa Review , Smartish Pace , Tupelo Quarterly , and elsewhere. Reddy received a 2017 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a Fall 2015 Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches writing at Stockton University.