[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_14/Milner.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]
During sex, a herd of spavined horses
runs through my body and out
my mouth. You just roister, lover,
never see the andalusians
on the sheets, palominos
vaulting the bedstead. You don’t
hear their hooves cantering
arrhythmia inside me,
mistake their sick whinnies for breathing
at orgasm, the froth from their mouths
for my own rabid dampness, or yours.
They pasture quietly when you are not around,
lip the apple of my womb, trough
at pools of lymph-’til your ingress
sends them bucking through my cervix
up my gut. Even the crows
flap blackly at you, the sheepdogs prick
ears, and the trout unschool when you come.
You come sudden and electric; I am horseless
when you go. Only when you move the things in me
do I remember I put them there, the summer
they came unshod and started limping
through my life, or the summer before,
when I made them into horses in the first place.
I like a metaphor I can domesticate, I guess;
something I can saddle and spur ’til it bleeds.
After you have left, the grassland breathes
with your gone body.
And then I fill it with another kind of longing-
cats, perhaps, hosts of them teeming with mites-
anything, really, to feed on the field
of this feeling.