Cole W. Williams

Life

my aunt loves horses, talks mostly horses
she’s out there right now three hours into farm
country—you would pass Grandma’s
square of pine, keep going, eventually take a right,
then a right, another, I imagine course horse-
hair on the seat of her truck, her clothes, everything,
once, in the city, I saw a horse—maybe more than one,
three legs with hooves sticking up from a gelatinous mass,
in a department store sorting bin, a gray bin
[full of clothes and hangers sticking out like sharp
elbows but] carrying the dead now. horses.
allowed to break form, release the lines of beauty,
[while touring a necropsy lab] in line, parade to the river,
with other horses [bins] for incineration—basic solution pH 14.
I have always been jealous of my aunt, my cousins,
and now I move my fingers over chewed boards,
a pasture fence, careful of slivers, I visit them
twice a day, visiting this farm, locking eyes, their tails
a rhythmic dance to keep the flies at bay.


Cole W. Williams poems have appeared in Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, Martin Lake Journal, Indolent Books online, Waxing & Waning, Harpy Hybrid Review, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. She recently attended Rockvale Writer’s Colony.

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Fall 2021