Old gal, we’ve got a long way to go.
The room is short. Your hooves are curved,
and what are we: a family?

 

A smattering of blood? Trimmed cartilage?
Turn something fresh into crumbed rust–
scrape it away with your hard razor, your

 

blue jeans crushed between your flat
teeth, your coffee stains, the two
gold-capped molars. Metal’s

 

what they had when you were twenty
and fucking your teeth up for the first
time. I’ve got better chances.

 

My root canals are obscured with molds.
Cream-colored concrete. Who can tell
the difference? You’re long

 

in the tooth. My horse-girl-friend,
Sage, says horses sniff the bucket
of shit scraped from the barn floor

 

like Horse Twitter—a who’s who
of the digestive tract. Who can count
our chances among the droppings?

 

We bet in the barn, our hearts racing,
dust under the shavings of your hooves,
dusk through the cut-out moon in the door.

 

I bend over your back, write another poem
in a notebook braced against your mane,
you, bleeding against the lashings of my pen.

 

What’s a girl to do? And who cares? Not us.
We wouldn’t be caught dead
beating anything otherwise.

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

ADRIANA BELTRANO is a poet from Jupiter, Florida. She is pursuing her MFA in poetry at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a managing editor of The Hopkins Review. She was named a 2024-25 Jake Adam York Prize finalist, and her work can be found in HAD, The South Carolina Review, and Little Patuxent Review.

 

 

The art that appears alongside this piece is “Fog of Doubt, Can’t Take Away My Clarity” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.