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Poetry

Once a week he holds me against him like a child
and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes 
sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,  

like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep 
my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking
boat beneath my feet, and that I will pitch forward  

into the sea of my weariness, so clear I can see
the sandy floor with its shifting shoal grass and blue crabs— 
and my body, always floating at the edge 

where vision and horizon meet, multiplied and ray-
filled, a jellyfish or low hum: If I am very still, 
can I sleep in your barn? I ask, awaking as if from a dream 

about being a horse in a pasture in spring—
that endless meal—my tail long and lengthening. 

 

 


Charity Gingerich’s first collection of poems, After June (Green Writers), won the Hopper Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Field, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Ruminate.

 

 

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