TRANSIT, BY KELLY MCQUAIN |
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Was there a horse? I wanted there to be one, all those days driving hard-knuckle back roads among cornfields, circling. A white horse standing by a derelict barn, the barn overtaken by ivy, the horse's head slung over a fence, a white animal so majestic I stop to offer an apple and to lay my hand across the ridge bridging its unfathomable eyes. So what, the horseflies? So what, those reckless humid days spent retracing old roads so deep-veined they fixated my body between highland and holler when what I ached for were skylines, foreign vistas, the going if not the getting there, new growth inching over old. It was not enough anymore to anchor myself to the smell of clover, summer peaches a tide of bluegrass rippling my ankles. Oh, how I needed there to be a horse! An animal I could pin my heart upon, wriggle free of my snakeskin self, allow thunderheads to growl inside me. Yet all I'd learn of flux and freedom would be my head leaning against a train window, feeling the thrum of motion in the glass, watching graffiti-covered bridges pass in a morning fog that knows the silent prick of a gravedigger's woes. There was no horse, only cars, only trains. Unmoored longing: the trail I chose. |
Kelly McQuain is the author of Velvet Rodeo, which was selected by poet C. Dale Young for the Bloom chapbook prize. His writing has appeared in The Pinch, Limp Wrist, Painted Bride Quarterly, Knockout, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kestrel, Rogue Agent, Redivider, and Cleaver, as well as in numerous anthologies, most recently Best New Poets 2020, The Queer South, and LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. He has been both a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar and a Lambda Literary Fellow, as well as a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. As an artist, his series of writer portraits appear on the cover of Fjords Review.