ADOLESCENCE

 Isaac George Lauritsen

I took a walk through a forest and smashed heads

with a deer bounding from the brush. I thought a

new thought: I am dead. But I wasn’t. Parts of my skull

scattered in the grass near the grass scattered

with the deer’s skull parts. Oh wow! Oh gosh! I am

so, so sorry! I said. I am befuddled! I said. The deer

blinked its new and sudden eyes. I took the blinks as

sentences, the “okay” that we collect our parts,

quietly and with no interruption to our later

activities. I knew not which parts were mine. I chose

those whose shapes willed me – one like a bird beak.

One a proper bowl. One a ship cutting through a

glassy sea – and clicked them into place to

recomplete my skull. I wasn’t sure about the forest.

I wasn’t sure about home. I questioned if I was ever

sure about home or if home was a place I had been

for long enough and simply grew to know. I walked

into the trees – the large looming uncertainty –

Isaac George Lauritsen is a poet, playwright, illustrator, and graduate student in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans (UNO). His poems can be found in The Roadrunner Review, The Shore, Tilted House Review, on a broadside from Octopus Books, and elsewhere. He serves as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine and teaches first-year writing composition at UNO.