I LOOK IN PEOPLE’S WINDOWS

by Angelina Brooks

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At the end of our street, I smell the dead deer
before I find her. Chest split open by a vehicle,
back broken by paw paw and mimosa.
Fresh but not too fresh, I imagine her silhouette

emerging from the undershrub between yard
and city sidewalk. The car that must not
have seen her in the winter night. I tell my husband
if the deer is not gone in two days, I’ll check on

the gray woman who lives alone there
at the end of the lane. I haven’t seen her lately 
I tell him; what if she is as dead as that deer?
He says we don’t live in short story. 

I remind him to check before he lets the dog out—
the one with an affinity for eggs and feathers,
whichever comes first; the boy-from-up-the-street’s
ducks are loose again, and for this week, death is done.





Angelina Oberdan Brooks is a writer and professor. The poems in her chapbook, Heavy Bloom, were largely generated when she camped across the country with her three dogs. Since those living-out-of-her-car summers, she has fallen love, embraced step-motherhood, and spent a lot of time healing. As Johanna Hedva writes, “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care,” and in that way, her life and her poems have become a series of tiny, daily protests—against production determining our worth, against busyness becoming a way of life, against obfuscating physical pain. She recently completed a writing residency at the Weymouth Center. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in various journals, including Halcyone, Split Rock Review, Litmosphere, and Cold Mountain Review.