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From: Vol.09 N.01 – A Poetics of Rights

The Horse

by Diane Glancy
The horse has a 3-acre pasture
but there is a path of matted grass from his shed 
to his sweet-feed bowl in a corner of the pasture.
His horseshoes mark the bare ground where he stands to eat
like an alphabet with the letters U and C
spilled on the ground.
A woman in a headscarf walks a 2-rut road through a far pasture.
A man with a stick walks on the paved road.
The hoof prints of the horses brand the dried mud.
The horse watches the child leave on the school bus 
and return in the afternoon while he waits for his sweet-feed.
His ears shaped like small teepees.
They turn to the airwaves in the wind that travel the world.
The horse picks up on the suffering.
He hears the call of geese, birds, field dogs.
At night the coyotes. 
All the refugees.
While in the day a gray squirrel runs along the fence-line by his bowl.
Published: August 2022
Diane Glancy

Diane Glancy’s latest books, Island of the Innocent, A Consideration of the Book of Job, and A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story, were published by Turtle Point Press in 2020 and 2021.  A book of nonfiction, Home Is the Road, Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit, is forthcoming in 2022 from Broadleaf Books. Among her awards are two
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an American Book Award, a Minnesota Book Award, an Oklahoma Book Award, an Expressive Arts Grant from the National Museum of the American Indian, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Other books and awards are on her website, www.dianeglancy.com.
Glancy lives in north central Texas where many tribes camped, Apache, Comanche, Wichita, Waco, Kiowa.

An Australian and international
journal of ecopoetry and ecopoetics.

Plumwood Mountain Journal is created on the unceded lands of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and to elders past, present and future. We also acknowledge all traditional custodians of the lands this journal reaches.

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