Fall 2018, Volume 25

Poetry by Donna L. Emerson

Doughboy and Jenny

Our summer horses, five-gaited
warm-bloods. Alert, easy to ride.

They brought us through tumbling
orchards, woods too lumpy to walk,
 narrow paths beside Campbell Creek.

Gave us words like forelock, withers,
coronet, fetlock, sixteen hands tall.

Horseshoeing, everybody standing around
talking while Grandpa scraped and tapped.

Doughboy, powdery white, his head
held high, Jenny, a cedar-brown Morgan.
Smooth, supple skin to lean into,

blood moving through all the time,
and through us too, being there, especially
when Doughboy rolled over during our ride

or got behind Jenny when she was in heat.
We had to jump off fast to the left

for their commotion scrambling, scooting
in dusty grass to avoid bruising
and at least stop laughing.


 

 

 

BIO: Donna Emerson recently retired from college teaching and her practice as a licensed clinical social worker. Her work has been published in numerous journals such as CQ (California Quarterly), Dos Passos Review, The Griffin, Quiddity and Naugatuck River Review, and in anthologies such as Echoes (2012), Music in the Air (Outrider Press) and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers). Her first full-length poetry collection, The Place of Our Meeting, was published by Finishing Line Press in January 2018.