This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay (Fernwood Press, 2025).
Landscape with Animated Deer
Now winter, thorny boughs, the cold
to stand against, everything
visible as breath, near-breaking.
And this herd, their bodies spooled
wire and lights. The rigid bow,
lift, bow of their heads just hammers home
how useless grazing is to them
in their empty frames. Even so,
their faces seem familiar and kind,
and I see myself in the tight
wire armature, studded with lights
that blink and flicker into wind.
They shed their pale glow over the lawn,
casting themselves against the house
and shrubs with a selfless animal grace,
as when, in a predawn blur years gone,
I walked the spine of a hill in the thaw
of another winter’s death, and saw
a deer step to the edge of the wood.
I was lit by that flare, the electric blood.
Ayelet Amittay is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon. Her first book, The Eating Knife, was published in April 2025. Her chapbook, Therapy Room, won second place in the 2024 International 3-Day Chapbook Competition and was published by Harvard Square Press. Ayelet’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Rattle, and others. She was a Yetzirah scholar in 2025. She runs a private psychiatric practice, Wild Geese Mental Health, and serves as an instructor for the Touchstone Institute. 
Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.
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