The phallic nature
of the horse; I was
never drawn to them
the way the other girls
were. My desires
never took the form
of a deep plunge into
soft brown from
the head – or even
the elongated middle –
no different to me
than the stomach
of a pig or a dog.
I used to pull at the
pants of a boy I liked
in grade school. He
yelled stop with such
desperation, it made
me feel predatory in
instinct, not prey
– the fallback position
for girls – more schoolboy
than shrinking violet,
more stallion from
a book I had read
than the ones I sat
on at the local farm,
their oblong heads
hanging over the rim
of fences to eat apples
and then perhaps a carrot.
When I was eighteen
I fell in love with a girl.
She just sprouted,
one day, like a flower
in front of me, emerging
from mousy bud to
ripened rose flesh
petals. I wanted to
give her my hands,
soft touches the way
a flower blooms:
a slow spreading out,
then bursting forth.
So sharp in her gaze,
she was beautiful,
and yet, that was why
the world told me – no –
I never spoke words
to her again, stepping
over the forlorn glances
across a sidewalk like
trampled blossoms.
If you want to talk
about horses, then I’d
say I have straddled
two separate kinds, two
distinct forms of desire,
neither of which were
accepted or approved.
What I mean to say is,
the horses were never
symbols of sexual desire
to me, not until I grew
up and saw the chains
around their necks.
This is a reprint of work originally published in Stone Highway Review.
Katherine MacCue is a graduate of the George Washington University. Her poetry has been published in RiverLit, Stone Highway Review, and she has forthcoming work in The Writing Disorder. She can be found at http://kvmacc.blogspot.com.
Fantastic!
Yes, fantastic.