Two Poems by Cassandra Dallett

In a Video Today Two Small Deer Ran Across the Golden Gate Bridge Behind Them an Idling Line of Migratory Animals in Plexi-Glass Boxes

when I was growing up we saw deer dart across country roads
big brown eyes stealthy on pavement
sometimes they didn't make it splattered windshield glass
leaving meat inside the grill
the whole car often crushed in around the body
and there was trouble to get into if it wasn't hunting season
so you quickly stuffed him in your trunk so as not to waste them
washed the blood from your hood
butchered him in your kitchen
tables running red
head staring sad eyes off the countertop
hooves and soft hide a savage decoration

in season it was free reign and the hunters came by truck load
dressed in their orange day glow vests their camouflage pants
little pouches of hot rocks to warm bottoms and cases and cases of beer
it is somewhat terrifying to wake up to armed men in your yard
their hunger not for the venison, too gamey for suburban taste buds
but for the kill the outsmarting of the spry animal
the satisfaction of tying him to the front of their car
prone legs splayed helpless
I always felt compelled to cover them
close eyes untie roped legs
lay him buck or her doe down with dignity
something those drunk and murderous bastards never had.



Start Here. . . 

He says
I don't deserve you
I say
Then start
He says
You're my goal
I say
You better build up
your drummer's callous
'cause I'm hard to beat.
The skin of my right index
finger will grow hard
with the story of us
pressed into paper.



Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA.  Cassandra writes of a counter culture childhood in Vermont and her ongoing adolescence in the San Francisco Bay Area.  A reluctant poet she believed poetry better left to the hippies and beats of her parent's generation.  While taking classes at Berkeley Community College she stumbled, or rather dragged her feet, into poetry.  When her father died in late 2006, wanting to keep his stories alive she wrote her first poem, Talk Story, a poem about a father who never shut up.  It won Poem of the Month at The Beat Museum of San Francisco.  Cassandra reads out often and in addition to several chapbooks, she has been published online and in print magazines such as Slip Stream, Sparkle and Blink, The Bicycle Review, Chiron Review, River Babble, and Up the River.  A full-length book of poetry, Wet Recklessness, was released from Manic D Press, May 2014.