Amy L. Fair
Across angular bones,
hollows of skull and sternum,
her skin pulls tightly, makes
her black eyes deeper,
her black hair thinner.
Her scalp seeps up through strands
like a shallow pool
of pale milk.
She drew
from the fray at the end
of the world some fortune
of the heart,
but to that harness
was fastened a strange horse.
A gallop, then a canter—
the two blurred the path;
shadow and white blaze
became only shadow.
Witnesses say they shouted,
but I remember silence,
like death riding snow.
He lifted
the robe of this slim girl,
this wraith,
and traveled her dark
valley of black hair
to her blacker, cherry-stone heart;
she later bore a foal
like ripe fruit in the snow,
like blood
in a shallow pool
of pale milk.
***
Amy L. Fair, a West Virginia native, makes her home in rural Oregon, where she teaches at a small community college and plans to grow old without any grace whatsoever.