"Boy With Red Stag" by George Richards

Illustration by Maddy Smith.

Down by the river, the open vein of it,

a boy threads through water looking for dragonflies.

Leaning in to hear the sounds better, he watches

pinheads stretchmark the river with his two huge eyes;

he watches himself spool apart on the water—

when a gust drags the eyes from one

end of the river to the other and he sees it:

the little fuscous body, red ochre spilling

from a wound as it darts, jumps bird-like,

its sudden neck-rise setting off birds that before

were watching the boy, trembling now at

the stag’s looking but keeping

very still not to scare it, slowly he settles into

the oil shale black of the stag’s pupil and this

untethers something, unfreights his soul:

so for a moment the breeze sets into place

and the whole mystery of his loneliness

suspends in the water and this small quiet

holding between them—the stag’s antlers like

wild arteries shedding velvet,

the boy’s eyes, swimming tadpole lights.

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George Richards

George is currently studying for his Masters in creative writing poetry at the University of East Anglia. He graduated from the University of Exeter in 2019 and has also spent time in Hong Kong teaching English as a foreign language. He has previously been an editor at Enigma, a university journal for creative writing, and contributes ecology and climate articles to the Hong Kong-based site Earth.org. He is an avid reader, writer and hiker. A senior editor here at Bloom in Doom.

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