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Clarice Hare

Mare with clipped wings

The truth tilts in the corner.
I see it in the room. My legs
rise to leave—

one foot in my Pegasus’ stirrup,
then both—

telescoping strenuously,
absorbing the force
of each toe-bouncing stride of
the stationary gallop
Naysh’s fucking
giving me.

Flanks latticed by
the whip—foam of my mouth
soaked through the
gray-ticked wafer of
my mattress—

So we make
of this what it is,
bursting our thoroughbred hearts
in a victorless race, until—

the coverage done, the restless one
(Apostate? Not today) laid
well and still—

the prostrated stallion’s
dragged down, back
to his own cell.

Red the edges
of the day. So high—
remote—that all they show
is, Say it—to me—if you dare.
Les (as they say in French)
brutes sont toujours
des brutes.

The event
marked in red on the calendar
on her stall door.


Fossil Hunting, Isle of Hoy

How hopelessly I love
to tread the gullies—
high-flung, rapid-
pock-marked—through the harpooned
fluorescent sun, watching your
scientific hunch in search of
Silurian wormshit.

At the glare’s defeat, a fresh-
hearted angel covers the ground
in ghostly glitter: nuckelavee’s
phosphorescent hoofsparks. You explicate
the biochemic blitz, while I
autoasphyxiate with my gossamer
shawl, curling shoulders back toward
the blackshore: radiant and
grand, the blood-orange loch just another
scurrying burn across the nautiloid-
haunted flood-bed, feeding our narrow
beach a fading Bloody
Mary mirror.

A eunuch’s pick
disturbs the serpentine intimacy
of two or twelve or twenty-seven
eon-orgying polychaetes, while blind salmon
thrash in the reedy sheet
where brackish meets the hypothermic sea,
washing out their
agitated optic sheaths.


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