That I was your simple bit a bride of pressure and prayer you ground grinding down The one who taps your teeth to get you to open—to be led be led let me in this psychic adumbration hitch a band of chances the old tack chiming a hymn’s cadenceWhose presence in the grain pail sweet warm, warm enough, you bow your head and tug the leather lead in whose hands— eternal cipher under tongue metallic rub by the snaggy corners of your mouth I, your simple bit I did not abandon youwhen the barn burned with contempt I slipped from the hayloft—your whinnies, cinders, the vicious air— I screened your eyes with a wet scarf to guide you through the falling rafters
Good Mare
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Used courtesy of the University of Utah Press.
Sara Ellen Fowler’s work has appeared in The Offing, Cream City Review, X-TRA, and Gigantic Sequins, among other publications. Her first book, Two Signatures, was selected by Joan Naviyuk Kane as the winner of the 2023 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2023 California Arts Council Emerging Individual Artist Fellowship. She holds a BFA in fine art from ArtCenter College of Design and an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside.
In Two Signatures, Sara Ellen Fowler initiates her readers into a synesthetic contract of close attention and deep feeling. From the wood floor of an art museum buckling with Lake Michigan moisture, to the mud-packed hooves of the horse of childhood, to an art student’s spit on a pane of mirrored glass, the poems’ images string together a necklace of exquisite longing. Pleasures and complexities of sensory experience lay the ground for a world where risk is rewarded and candor is sensual. The poet explores registers of desire and power, drawing upon her training as a visual artist to make a studio of language. Temperature and texture gain grammar as the poems reach toward awe via multivalent psychology, sex, and sculptural interventions. These poems invite readers to explore the vulnerability and insistence that mark one’s devotion to any creative practice.
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
