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.