Horses & Not Being Saved

This here speaks of safety.

Not otherwise, other.

Why flail

your arms and work your mouth in that way, wanting,

wanting

something?

There’s a waver in the air,

a kind of gloss like oil on a tarmac, summer. And an unknown heat that calls up the fevered whip.

Red is indistinguishable.

Red is green, like the long grasses of the meadow

we were made to cross all those days, all those afternoons

stretching

out.

Girls in their blue jeans longing to gallop, to cut loose,

thinking

Here’s what I came for.

Not

the circle in the corral.

Round & round.

Steady & sure.

Not

the perambulation

of trail.

But, rather, those last minutes, when the guide said, Yes.

Now.

Then was for running.

Kelly R. Samuels is a Best of the Net and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is the author of two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use (Unsolicited) and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks (Finishing Line). Her poems have recently appeared in RHINO, Cold Mountain Review, DMQ Review, The Pinch, and Quiddity. She lives in the Upper Midwest.