Horse Story

A horse died that day. I gazed at the blue-green ocean,
looking for something. I don’t
know what.

This was Dad’s favorite track,
my sister said I placed bet after bet, relearned
a language: exacta, trifecta,
quinella sailed from my tongue
like a fleet of exotic ships.

(What world is this?) I lost race after race, no matter
how loud I yelled their names
into wind. I think the horses
knew I wasn’t really looking
at them.

And then my horse fell. Just like that, it took the others
down with it. One by one, they
tripped, trampled its chestnut
body, collapsed into a knot
of muscle & hooves that
couldn’t be undone. The jockey
was thrown. But I didn’t care.
All I could think was my horse
is dead.

I wanted to go back to Belmont Park with its drunk old men
slapping their thighs with
rolled up racing forms
torn bet tickets on polished
cement, the stink of cigars.
He’s in that horse,
I thought.

I wanted to hold the moment
before the horse died.
I wanted a still shot of the horse,
a photo flipbook where it moves,
doesn’t move, like the kind I drew
when I was a kid.

But this is a horse story,
and I don’t get to choose how
it’s told.

Because there are horse stories and there are horse stories.

This story is both.

Ja'net Danielo is the author of The Song of Our Disappearing, a winner of the Paper Nautilus 2020 Debut Series Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Radar Poetry, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gulf Stream, Frontier Poetry, and 2River View, among other journals. Originally from Queens, NY, she teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA with her husband and her dog. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.