Dana Henry Martin (she, they, any) is a poet, medical writer, and health- and mental-health advocate whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, Fence, FRiGG, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Stirring, ONE ART, SWWIM, Willow Springs, and other journals under the names Dana Henry Martin, Dana Guthrie Martin, and M Ross Henry. Their essay Impossible Histories: Voicing Traumas in Poetry was published by Flapper Press earlier this year. Their chapbooks include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their full-length collection, Crude, about growing up in Oklahoma, is in progress. Martin weaves, birds, and hangs out with the cows who live next to the cemetery in Toquerville, Utah. Below is a sample poem that first appeared in MadHat Annual.

—

Fawns Discovered Inside a Dead Doe

You lived inside your mother’s womb, its water
and salt. You were two, twins. Each a mirror
for and of the other. One of you laid with hooves
tucked beneath your torso, your neck arched
so your head could rest next to your own body.
The other laid along the first, a drape,
not an inch of space parting this fur from that,
this muscle from that, this bone from that.
Eight ankles, eight legs, four ears, four eyes—
everything lovely about a deer, doubled.
The taxidermist who rolled your mother over
that evening by the highway was not the man
who struck her but the one who arrived after
and tried to help. He found you too late,
fully formed but drowned before you lived.
He gathered you in a blanket, brought you home
and preserved the uterine form of your bodies—
the way you nestled one another through death,
thin skins pulled like tarps over spines and hips,
your two faces facing each other, your mouths
that nearly touch but don’t. Now, in your vitrine,
you pass breathless secrets back and forth without
end. Secret of death. Secret of suffering. Secret
of two slipping in and out of this dark world as one.