When I wrote this poem, I lived in the Westcott area. I would regularly get up at dawn and sit on my second-floor porch drinking coffee before going to work. The street was always quiet and very still, then I would see deer come out, and I found a lot of pleasure in watching them, which is what inspired me—a little pre-dawn Syracuse magic. It felt “magical,” because in the cities I have lived before it was not common to see deer walking down a city street. My second book of poetry, All Throats Sound Animal, will be coming out in late summer of 2018. There are quite a few poems within that book that have deer imagery, so you could say it's something of a recurring theme in my work.