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Intimacy


ISSUE:  Winter 2021


I remember watching my mother 
with the horses, the cool, fluid 
way she’d guide those enormous 
bodies around the long field, 
the way she’d shoulder one aside
if it got too close or greedy 
with the alfalfa or apple.
I was never like that. Never 
felt confident around those 
four-legged giants that could 
kill with one kick or harm
with one toss of their strong heads. 
To me, it didn’t make sense 
to trust a thing that could 
destroy you so quickly, to reach
out your hand and stroke 
the deep separateness 
of a beast, that long gap 
of silence between you
knowing it doesn’t love you, 
knowing it would eat the apples 
with as much pleasure from
any flattened palm. Is that why 
she moved with them so easily?
There is a truth in that smooth
indifference, a clean honesty 
about our otherness that feels 
not like the moral but the story.

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