Here, Maggie Millner’s “Equus” – in our December issue – goes to Andalusia.

1. One on level, this poem is about longing, a longing that can only be dealt with in a visceral, sexual way. What is one emotion that belongs entirely to you? What things have you arranged inside yourself and built into horses?

It’s a fairly common coping mechanism to visualize grief as an object that might then be isolated and expelled from the griever. It’s a fairly common exercise in poetry, too: to concretize the abstract, to compare the world to a stage or fear to a handful of dust. In “Equus,” horses are the physical form of the speaker’s desire. Their departure signals a sense of loss and longing.

2. Horses appear in poems every so often as a marker of sexual strength or intensity, but here you do something different. Here, the horses seem to signify desire itself. Why pick horses?

Horses inhabit a space between domesticity and wildness – between tameness and danger – that I find compelling. They signify a kind of cowboy nostalgia. They wear shoes. Maybe horses work so well as figurative carriers of human experience because they’re also physical carriers of human cargo. In a poem that seeks to explore the defamiliarization of one’s own body, horses feel like appropriately strange, appropriately liminal figures. Continue reading →