15th of April
Saturday morning,
I watch condensation drip down the window
and steam rise from the brim of a blue coffee cup.
Today marks a year since your death
and I still sit at this same window,
sip from a cup you gave me two Christmases ago.
I reach out to wipe the glass,
and the garden comes into focus,
just as a figure steps out onto the lawn,
a shape made of delicate bones:
a deer , alone and trembling,
as she picks her way through the long grass.
Deer don’t come down this far from the forest.
Perhaps she came for the mushrooms;
the morels and the fresh shoots of grass.
I move closer to the window, she stops,
body juddering like an old movie reel.
Then she looks right at me.
I am close enough to see her dark brown eyes.
She tilts her head to the side, as if to speak.
But there are no words.
She disappears and leaves the garden bare.
But for an instant, your brown eyes looked back at me.
Megan O’Reilly is a 22 year old Creative Writing and English literature student living in Bath. She is currently working on her first pamphlet of poetry inspired by the loss of her best friend. You can find her café loitering and petting every dog she meets, that is if you don’t confuse her with her identical twin sister.