Claire Millikin

Winter Horses

In snow’s under-speech of lucid shadows,

horses spook in the field behind a motel

owned by emigrants who fear for their lives

and politely serve American motorcyclists

continental breakfasts, looking the other way.

This winter’s horses carry the injustice

of being set aside because they are afraid.

I show up most mornings with apples

from the only grocery store still in town,

where old women shop with carts they own;

I’m also becoming old, invisibly, my eyes the tender 

eyes of a natural thief, polite and still.

You cannot Google my winter horses, and Artificial

Intelligence knows nothing of them.

They’re real in the way of imaginary numbers, this

numb medicine of refuge I master and am mastered by,

riding them when I must, walking beside them

when I can, settling and unsettling the distances of vision.

I’ve always been a runner, but this winter it’s worse.

Only the winter horses understand my terror, a constant urge to sprint.

I feed them apples sweet and dormant,

shipped from Argentina, the seasons opposite ours,

but dictatorships we have in common, theirs gone, ours arriving. 

Ask the horses nothing, they answer as shadows

trace the material world in winter’s mind.

Soon enough, hawthorn and crab apple will open.

Language is never a horse to ride.

I feed my horses weather and sometimes sugar.

Claire Millikin is the author of ten books of poetry including Magicicada (Unicorn Press 2024), winner of the 2024 Foreword Indie Book Award for Poetry. Magicicada is about juvenile solitary confinement. An earlier book, Dolls (2Leaf Press 2021), an extended elegy for transwoman Sage Smith, was a semifinalist for the PSV Poetry Book Award for North American Publishers and Writers. Millikin lives in coastal Maine, enjoys long distance running, and teaches for the University of Maine system.

Betsy Sholl

Fragment

I was always asking something, asking over and over,

never listening to the answer, as if the question was mine,

the answer more like someone else’s wow

over a shooting star I didn’t see.

And isn’t the point to see? —

to be dropped to our knees by a light-struck violin,  

its pitch intent on breaking the heart, and us

crying out, Yes, all right, break it.

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You

(University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), winner of the Four Lakes Prize.  Her ninth collection is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019). She is faculty emerita in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.

B. J. Buckley

Late Rothko, Gray Over Black

for Mark Zimmerman

Low December sun paints the trees, the fields,

with brilliance, for hours, bare branch, shorn stubble

shimmering gold, and through our kitchen windows

across the table where the cats curl in their beds,

bathed in light, purring, warmed, in the wintery chill

of the house — and as it falls further, sinks into

the still ocean of afternoon, early evening, the whole

sky shouting blue above grows bands below,

of butter, then milk, then rose, then apricot, orange,

peach, lemon, like quick slides shifting on a screen,

one of those old carousel trays, click, click —

and almost without noticing, blue turns in on itself,

grays, shades, shadows; along the horizon, soft edge

of darkness, black over lavender, black over plum,

over violet, over cobalt, a blackness we have always

known, inhabited — womb, midnight, void, vastness,

that grave we rise and rise from, before and after,

ends and beginnings of worlds.

B. J. Buckley has worked as a teaching artist in Arts-in-Schools programs throughout the west and Midwest for more than 50 years. Her poem, "Pickin' Out", was a Finalist for the 2025 Western Writers of America Spur Award for Poetry. B. J.'s most recent books are Flyover Country (Pine Row Press) and Night Music (Finishing Line Press), both in 2024.