Poem-a-Day - "Horse" by Lisa Olstein

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March 29, 2023 

Horse

Lisa Olstein

I became his 
horse meaning 
for a minute 
there I looked
promising like 
a winner might
just maybe 
he could drive 
me someplace 
special someplace 
he wanted to 
go or I was 
already there 
or if not quite
closer than 
he was just then 
and so valuable 
or vault-able 
either way hurry 
up and neigh.

Copyright © 2023 by Lisa Olstein. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 29, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Horse’ inhabits a moment of metaphorical thinking—not metaphor as embellishment to thought, but as thought, as a means of knowing. The sudden realization that I was being used by someone registered as feeling like a horse being ridden, while maintaining a watchfulness about this circumstance and rider, as horses do. The poem speaks from this subjected subjectivity, not (yet) harmed, but awake to a complex unfolding. I wanted the lines to tumble down the page like a Jacob’s Ladder, one hinged to the next, simultaneously orienting and disorienting, the way meaning cascades through us in moments of sudden recognition.”
—Lisa Olstein

Lisa Olstein
Lisa Olstein is the author of Dream Apartment, forthcoming this fall from Copper Canyon Press, among many other titles. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship, she is a professor at the New Writers Project and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Late Empire

Late Empire
(Copper Canyon Press, 2017)
 

 


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Thanks to Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Seuss’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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