There are no horses here by Erin Bedford

October 27, 2023
Poem title: There are no horses here Poet name: Erin Bedford Poem: only the gate you bolted through as soon as I smoothed your flank and whispered in your velvet ear Gwan’go Hold on If you’re a steed in this one I shouldn’t leave out that pretty Bay or the saddle laid on the fence Alright that never happened There are no horses here only this memory-gallop whipped on by the report from Pompeii about a discovery under hard layers a mare’s skeleton in ash leather harness inside the outline of a horse How do you hold the shape of long gone beauty With an injection of plaster but also with stories about that last night in the stable poems plumping a husk so it won’t collapse because there are no horses here only bones and a harness imagined echo of a four-beat gait the cave of a heart racing End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Erin Bedford A previous version of this poem appeared online in Train: a poetry journal, October 18, 2018. Erin Bedford is a poet and novelist. After completing an Honours B.A with a Specialist in History at the University of Toronto, she attended the Humber School for Writers and was later mentored by poet Betsy Warland through Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. Her short work has appeared in The Temz Review, Juniper, Map Literary, Train, GUEST, the lickety split, Catamaran Literary Reader and is forthcoming in EVENT magazine. She is founder and editor of Pinhole Poetry: a digital journal.