I’m beginning to think my neighbors change into deer at dusk each night. And wake up human, dewy buff in the clover. The way the clothes are strewn about the front porch. The way the doe’s face scoops the last light glancing off the buck, their chestnut bodies squaring up to sound like chairs to a table. No no no. I get it. Say what you will. But that’s me sighing as they lower their heads and eat. And that’s them rising, squaring up my sigh, and blessing it. The darkened hummingbird feeder nodding, needing filled. The smell of lilac and grass mowed to the quick.

evening glow
filling the word deer
with deer

Jonathan Humphrey’s

work has recently appeared in Acorn, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and The Heron’s Nest. With a fondness for whiskey and whippoorwills, he divides his time between the lights of Nashville and the woods of his native Kentucky.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Boy From Cave City, Kentucky (A Wreath of Sourgrass), haibun story by Jonathan Humphrey first published in cho 18.3 (1 December 2022); and selected for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2023 Anthology

⚡ NASA Gives Spiders, Insects LSD, haibun story in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 7, March 2021)

⚡ Song of Sweat (A Substation In Whitley County, Kentucky), haibun story in MacQ (Issue 4, July 2020)