Cowpokes spun lasso diction
across a white girl’s youth.
Storefronts seemed larger
than they were just as
what I presented was flat.
A mustache on one man’s lip
stood for passion, on another’s
meant death. What was I to do
with the heavy weight of skirts?
A horse was a loved thing,
its eye-lashed eye the place
I could disappear to,
but not one day passed
that softened my face,
everything being as it was
choked by a west Texas wind.
Only the light held me, its grave
distance making me weep.
The air itself was brash,
and at dusk mestizo blood
colored the dirt with trouble.
A woman fast becomes a man
when the pressures are right,
but now, lifetimes later,
it’s the horse’s eye I remember.
Susie Patlove was a finalist for the 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council Award. Her work has appeared on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and in Ted Kooser’s column, American Life in Poetry. Poems of hers have been anthologized in Morning Song (St. Martin’s Press). Her chapbook Quickening was published by Slate Roof.