Adam Patric Miller: Blood Orange

How do you get ideas for your poems?

The visiting poet says he goes into the woods to catch a deer but always comes back with a rabbit or a handful of berries.

What was it like for you growing up?

The government, he says, gave out machetes and guns and said, “Go kill the Chinese people.” He and his family had to flee the country.

The visiting poet: black hair, thick-framed glasses, jeans, black Doc Martens. The visiting poet’s voice sounds like the wind that rises around you when you are alone in the woods.

Will you read one of your poems for us?

He will not read any of his poems aloud.

Our librarian, who asked if he would, holds his book to her chest and stiffens. The poems, he says, are not that good. Reading poems aloud is increasingly difficult. He wants to conserve breath.

One winter morning, years ago, as I drove south on I-95 towards Bridgeport, a big deer leaped onto the highway. He dodged commuter traffic, headed west for the center partition. I thought, yes, he’s going to make it. On hall duty, and later that night in New Haven, not far from Harold Bloom’s house, not far from the other side of Prospect Street, where teenagers like my students sold crack and nightly gunfire popped and faded into familiarity, I wrote my deer poem.

After the visiting poet left, I talked to John, how good it was to talk like that to a poet, to consider a poem as a score of music, and when it is read aloud, it is the breath of death, and how the deer is still out there, alone, shivering, early morning, in March, but he knows spring is close.

He lifts his head up toward a branch. He munches a bud. I tell John about the fate of my deer, how the two stanzas were lost. I could resurrect them, make a new poem, toss in a blood orange like a grenade. John shared one, yesterday, the skin spattered darker, not a hunter’s orange. Cut open, the partitioned flesh is like the red when you kill a flea with your nail, blood comes out, or it’s like the red moon a deer hunter might see.

The visiting poet wanted to get back to western PA, to live where he was raised, where everyone wanted to lynch him because so many in town fought in Vietnam and, you know, they thought he was the enemy.

When the visiting poet smiled, his teeth shone black.

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Copyright 2025 Adam Patric Miller

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Essay Selection in The Best American Essay Series. His op-eds have appeared nationally in over 200 media outlets.