I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let's be honest, I like
that they're ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don't you want to believe it?
Don't you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it's going to come in first.
Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth
By Timothy Donnelly
Again the sound of quartz pounding quartz
into Neolithic spear points
to be hafted onto shafts with tree-resin glue
and a twine made of fibers harvested from dead plants
comforts me as it keeps me
awake nights, leaving me feeling equally
provided for and covered in blood.
Again history’s blistery tongue in my ear blurts
the cave of the belly goes
deeper than thought, and is less wholesome:
the vapors of the breath condense there, sour
by the hour on the walls, advancing
into pools whose surfaces strobe in archaic code
and whose depths cradle my kind of salamander.
At what point in the mud does an act of what
might be called independence become
possible is the question
on all of our limbs, not minds, not yet, although
we’re getting there bit by bit, and then
we’ll plateau for a period before gliding back
down into the huddle, dragging everything with us.
And when the future arrives in its vehicles
to poke through the mineralized
forms we leave behind, will we all be one to its eye,
or will it make a difference who
among us tried to stop ourselves, or tried to stop those
in charge, or whether any of us put their young
to sleep at the end, and if with poison, or with song?
