Rick Christiansen
Rick Christiansen is a former corporate executive, stand-up comedian, actor and director. His work can be found in MacQueen’s Quinterly, Oddball Magazine, Stone Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, As It Ought to Be Magazine and other publications. His first full length poetry volume, “BONE FRAGMENTS”, was published this year by Spartan Press. He has recently been nominated for a Touchstone Award. He is the co-host of SpoFest, a member of The Writer’s Place and a member of The St. Louis Writers Guild. He lives in Missouri near his fiancé Kim and his eight grandchildren.
His New Antlers
It started with a bump—
barely a bruise under his hair,
but by Tuesday,
a velvet crown was blooming from his skull
like something holy
and inconvenient.
Mom gasped when he walked into the kitchen
and knocked down the spice rack.
Cinnamon everywhere.
He tried to apologize,
but the antlers got there first—
took out the light fixture
and a ceiling tile.
By Thursday, he couldn’t fit through doorways,
without turning sideways,
tilting like a boy trying to bow
with too much gravity.
I told him to stop it,
to cut them off
or think smaller thoughts.
“You’re always doing this,” I said.
“Making everything about you.”
But I was the one who yelled
when the walls cracked.
He just blinked—
eyes rimmed red
like they’d been staring into snow for too long.
We tried putting him in hats.
Wide-brimmed things from the thrift store.
One with feathers that made him look
like a lost colonial ghost.
Another like a jungle explorer
who had gotten too close to some terrible god.
He slept on his side,
pillowed between chair cushions,
his antlers poking holes in the drywall.
Every morning,
I found tufts of plaster dust
in his hair,
like dandruff made of houses
we couldn’t afford to fix.
I told myself it was just growing pains,
some weird hormonal thing.
But his silence grew
like a room added to the house
when no one was building.
It took me weeks to stop being angry.
Even longer to stop laughing
when he got stuck in the hallway,
antlers wedged
like some broken wishbone
we couldn’t make a wish on.
But last night
I saw him curled up in the bathtub,
trying to hide
the velvet peeling away—
raw bone beneath,
the color of grief.
And I remembered:
The man at the door
with the badge and the clipboard—
his voice a flat tire on gravel.
We couldn’t answer his questions.
The backpack that never came back
from his walk home from school that day.
He came home without words.
But the silence reeked of something taken.
How he stopped talking after that night
but started drawing forests
in the margins of his schoolbooks—
dense places
without people.
Now the house is full of cracks
and antler-shaped shadows.
We eat dinner in shifts.
Mom cries when no one is looking.
I’ve started sleeping in the living room
just to be near him.
And when I wake
to the scrape of horn on plaster,
I don’t yell anymore.
Instead,
I open the window
a little wider.
