Five Poems by Holly Deer

Griffin McElroy Remakes The Universe

isopropyl alcohol and plastycene molds
q-tips and circuit boards and bubbling molten bronze

He's never done this before, you know- not like this-
and yes he's seen the tutorials but any laborer knows there's no substitute
for having your hands in it, for getting it under your nails as you warp and fold,
just ask the lip-licking dads who stand at the edge of the lawn whenever someone
has to work on their car.

blender models and sandpaper and a diet coke in a koozie
little plastic tab to cover the drinking hole and some sort of pulley system

The slow heat from the forge is the hardest part, smokey fingers enveloping limb and brow and slow roasting the tender meat within. He is smiling, though. Every time he pulls one of you from the coals, he is smiling. Pops one into his mouth still warm, the hiss of steam as we cool on his tongue, the microscopic scream of terror as he trims an extraneous appendage from our form with a clean incisor.

hand cut wooden jigs and wedges for folding hide
upholstery foam by the massive swollen bag and a deep freeze full of blood pouches

It really is an improvement when he's done- not that the last guy did such a bang up job in the first place. We are happy in our enclosure on the mantle. We ooh and ahh at the fairy lights which guide us down Main Street. The little merry-go-round actually spins. Can you believe it?

I Try To Keep My Middle Eastern Girlfriend From Finding Out

we bombed an elementary school for girls in Tehran.

on my end step, the man in the box tells me those people
don’t respect my rights.

what a wonder! o what awful Grace transmutes
my liberation from their little broken bodies!

clever Isabel.
how you tried to tell us.
you and the chorus of the dead.

If Adam Pickled The Apple*

*(with sincere apologies to the poet Danielle Coffyn) Whipped like a froth into his final form by its nectar he snatched that hell bastard
right off its branch

wrung it half to death before Eve, hands on his shoulders, begged we might need him

and of course she was right.

So off they went to exile, the four of them, husband and wife and serpent and apple

hearts still thumping from the singular rush that accompanies one's first disobedience.

I don't have to tell you how hard those first weeks were- everyone nearly ate everyone

probably a dozen times. But the snake knew the watering holes, kept them cool-

every few nights they'd roast slivers of knowledge over the fire, feel the veracity

of their way come flooding back to them, see the great tree of technology mapped

neatly in the stars, find themselves overwhelmed with grief for the colors of their once-home

as we all do now and then.



It's one such blissed-out fucked-up night that sees Adam jump out of his bedroll

say well, babes- for everyone was babe to him in those days-
announce well, babes, we ought to make it last.

And they got to work by the fire discovering sugar and vinegar, distillation and preservation, bacteria and disease, salt and pectin, vacuum sealing and glass shaping, simple adhesives for paper labels and colorful graphic design.

It's hard work, I bet you can imagine it, and halfway through they have to stop to
bury the snake

so that's a whole thing. Nobody has written a funeral song yet so they try, take time

out of weaving the world to try, and the wake is hardly the time to share what they're calling plasma for its consistency

so they have to run out real quick to create the quick-service industry from

base principles, whatever those are.



As far as small funerals go it's pretty good, and much later Eve will regale her many daughters-

for time in desperation does whet one's appetite for such human delights as love and a good husband-

with stories and photos of the day. They will sneer at the shriveled up snakeskin

in his pretty basket, marvel Daddy really made that by hand? Goodness! I guess he

loved that silly thing.



The older boys- quite a few of them, too, and wide like their grandfather-

find themselves too busy to spend much time with the sheep or at the altar.

They have their hands full with the little ones, or

their minds on the girl down the way- See Cain's dirty feet beat a path from the grocer,

see what stolen chocolate lines his chubby lips and his rough-stitched pockets- the latter portion

gifts, of course, for his little brothers.

OVERTON WINDOW SLAMMED SHUT ON MY GOCK AND DOLLS

So it's a race to the doctor to make sure the girlies are still swimming and they are, thank Goodness, cuz me and my girlfriend and our other girlfriend Goodness, the three of us got big plans for those girlies. I keep my pants nice and loose so they know the breeze early. You understand.

Bruising only lasts a few days but the girlfriend and Goodness, they force me to spend 'em in bed. In protest I kiss them each seventeen times on the face, so it's not like I don't try. I really would rather be up and doing anything I can get my hands on that someone else might beat me to. But we got those plans. So I got to stay in bed. You understand.

When Goodness gets back from her job at the Hating Yourself Factory we watch the three AM news. Twelve years ago I was settled science and now the government wants me dead or gone or worse. Goodness is too tired to cry so we switch to something happier like literally anything else and I idly daydream about starting a cooking channel on YouTube because it's hard to cook when you're fucking clueless like I was, still am probably. You understand.

Before bed we practice for the big one, the ritual we've been writing and rehearsing for decades. We're not just going through the motions either- it's good practice, genuine effort, and we identify several problem points to be addressed before the night. Of course I can only do so much with my injury, but I show up and do my part like I always do, and Goodness looks at me with only a moderate amount of pity. You understand.

In the morning the girlies feel fine and I demand freedom from my captivity, and when my gentle overlords relent I do the dishes so fucking good you don't even know, can't imagine, don't have the body fat to handle the amount of psychedelics it would require to reach the level of cosmic ascension necessary to begin comprehension of how good I do those dishes. Girlfriend laughs when I turn around from the sink cuz there's soap on my nose and the sound makes it all worth it. You understand.

By lunch time, which is late for us because everything is, by lunch time it's time to prove my worth again so I start in on the texts and bones for the ritual. The work is wizardry and tedium, artistry and academia, construction and killing. It is exhausting. It is disabling. I have to be ready for anything. You understand.

Around dinner time I begin to roll my eyes back into my skull so I can see the future, which is obviously dogshit to have to do, but you don't change what you ignore so I look. I will need to know what we will need to know. Goodness feeds my twitching body Tropical Fruit Gushers, and the saliva which breaks from that imperfect seal is oil iridescent and clings to the table. I am silently sketching two faces, pencil in my fist like a fork for a toddler. You understand.

This is the ritual- or its purpose, its product. Twins. Goodness tells me there's no guarantee but I want so badly for them to be twins. I want them to have each other. They are going to need someone and there is similarly no guarantee that when they are needed they will have me. Disease could take me tomorrow and the work could- should- must- will continue without me. The stakes are youngest daughter's quinceñera high. You understand.

Is it so bad, I wonder over my post-dinner chocolates, that I want at least one of them to look like me? Of course they won't at first, babies don't look like anybody, but once they're ready? Once the work is over and I have made them incomprehensible dykefags the likes of which the world has never seen? The wretched cockroach queers you have feared in legends, pure of heart and awakened by fury, who will not let you destroy their world?¹ When I have rendered unto them what is theirs and what is Caesar's and what is the Lord's? When my babies find out the TV shows I watched when I was younger and have no choice but to see me hanged as an example? When our eyes meet from the gallows? I want to see my grey sky blue. You understand.

1. With sincere apologies to Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball Z.

Two Facts

1. For a period of a few decades in the fourteen hundreds, the men who drew the marginalia for illuminated manuscripts all began drawing images of snails. Snails staring down armored knights, snails with swords and shields, snails floating ominously towards frightened axe-wielding farmers. Experts do not agree on why this happened. Some believe that the snails represent the wealthy and their tendency to self-isolate. Historian Lillian Randal believes the snails represent the Lombards, a germanic group being mocked by the largely-french drawings.

2. In 2026, if you first raise one hand up next to the other and then swap their relative elevations while saying a number, any child in the world will repeat this motion back to you, instinctually know its meaning, and spend much of the rest of their day smiling and remembering that interaction.



Holly Deer is a rejected digitigrade Christmas mascot for fat girls haunting an abandoned factory in small town Ohio. Her work can be found on her instagram @h0llydeer and occasionally elsewhere.