undomestication
horses
in the walls of my heart.
horses whisking,
manes like waterfalls.
my ribcage swells:
a wooden pin
thrashed against,
impacted by restlessness:
receptive as a gong,
defined by vibration:
each brush incapacitating.
thought stampedes.
derealized,
under an ominous sky I see myself
to an extent, as though beyond
mounding dust
the hooves of my mind send up
running from itself.
running after itself.
sometimes, I will catch a horse.
I try to make it drink
from my hands, yet private ponds
cannot host. yet I must
teach my pervicacious horses
to sip without rippling.
shivery flexes.
sometimes my horses cannot stop shuddering.
sometimes I cannot help
but wish I could see myself straight,
rather than merely in peripheries.
overcast,
the pupils’ moonless wells
amplify wildness…
sometimes, I will catch
the horse’s insolence
to discipline.
By Emily Ellison
Biography:
Emily Ellison is a graduate of Texas State University’s MFA in Creative Writing program; she was the inaugural interviews editor of their literary journal Porter House Review (winner of Best Debut Magazine during the 2020 CLMP Firecracker Awards), in which her conducted interviews are located. Her poetry can be found in Southword: New International Writing, Breakwater Review, and Foothill Journal, among other places; she was also a runner-up for The Raw Art Review Walt Whitman Prize for Poetry in 2018. Currently, Emily and her cat-in-crime Pancake are appreciating the pacific northwest.