Three Poems
Equus Pulmonary / Horse Lung
Over the finish line there’s a grey horse.
I pause. Then halt. Sweaty palms cup
knees. A horizontal line hardens my spine.
So I reach down, clawing at oxygen
spills to contain, plotting to catch one more
beat, to grasp your deep inhale & exhale
in which I wish I could blanket my body.
I pull myself up to the ground’s chin,
fingers steepled at your long neck.
Salt and pepper wisps that never
grew tame enough for me to braid.
Yet it remains still now in my hope chest.
How do I weave such absence,
what was escorted into echo?
Still you are so still beneath my body.
Never how it was in half our universe.
Your lungs rose & fell, bred
to carry mine. Our lungs
contracted & expanded across
fields. Robbed of this coupling
my hands now claw at the rocky earth
and I must count human footfalls,
lassoing with each step one more breath,
a teetering breath I can anchor into the rubble.
At the finish line the grey horse
observes the absences behind runners.
Ears pricked forward, gaze still
looking over our shoulders.
What are you running from? he asks.
Staccato Intimacies
De-boned, this beach ball
subtracts a firm shadow
from the surface but
on the pool bottom
a dark orb exhales
under its white-red-
yellow-and-blue
stripes while the
gurgling water filter
sings itself to sleep
because there has been
no rainwater for weeks.
My sister doesn’t yet want
the dog to hear our
post dinner plans.
W…A…L...K
she mouths,
piercing air with
her fork. The dog
snores under the table.
Far away under a table you first
tasted me, crooning adult
lullabies into my skin.
If I mouth the letters
of your name now
would life still future fake
or would I somehow conjure the
head of our baby crowning from me?
Dishes in the sink, my
sister glances at
the leash, its
fluorescence
flashing, and the
dog’s eyes open wide.
Indexing Hélène Rytmann
—After Rebecca Hazelton’s “The Man: A Compilation”
It is a myth that van Gogh painted best
when he was sick. What other myths
climb and seek? Listen to how they
Velcro-off each other in the ether. Passion
drawn, triggered by mental illness, drug ind-
uced. The mind Summit constructed ex vivo.
Our fingers yearn to ascend the fault-
line ridges hanging from the Professor’s
brow. A fractured underbelly, a tale
marker in the unseamed Cultural Theory Anthology.
Louis Althusser killed his wife, I’m sorry to say,
and through his sorry-saying ex-
hale, the Professor crests the text.
But there’s no real egress, not really,
the Professor knows
we know
he will also die
but not vis-a-vis asphyxiation
because he’s clan-kin-proximate.
Her name was Hélène Rytmann, adds the Internet.
Both his hands straddled her larynx,
he off-ed her with the same thumbs
that got her off, canyoning her labia,
sloping words from sentences.
His Ideological State Apparatuses
that we erect and clamp
around her, a daisy-chain of carabineer weeds.
Almost everyone knows
Althusser strangled and murdered her.
We were not everyone, dear professor, almost
never one until you said so. Now: we must belay the
myth that women catch their breath among footnotes.
Laura Evers (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in English literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Born in Cincinnati, she now calls Cleveland home. She serves as an Editorial Assistant for RHINO, a poetry journal based in Chicago, and her work has appeared in Overheard Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, The Rumpus, and the Chicago Review of Books. Follow her on Twitter: @lauraevers
Artwork by Damaris Swass