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Race Track, Hialeah, FL
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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8 Race Track, Hialeah, FL I slipped my arms into a dress of fog and the whole unbroken summer opened to let me in: those mornings my mother drove back streets so we could see them: before heat and crowds and bets when clouds leaned close but didn’t speak, we leaned on railings to watch the horses practice, orbiting the track’s green center, its far-off oval of flamingos & palms like the place on paper where, years later, I’d set my compass tip, careful to make my circles concentric, meaning they shared a heart. Horses’ hearts are huge, their legs impossibly skinny. At home I traced their shapes from books, pressed so hard my pencil left a moat around each photo, a hollow that held them safe. I trusted tile roofs and Banyan roots dropping from each branch, like the rope of the tire swing that left me dizzy, spinning between dirt and sky. All around, my city spiraled out, coils of clay 9 widening a bowl to hold the impossible things I was learning to believe—how roots could grow in air, or two lines reach endlessly and never touch. Even after the horses left for other tracks, swaying in the dark of trucks with the highway’s white line licking always ahead, ticking like August under my skin, I curled in my swing, looped my pencil around withers, pastern, hooves, I leaned back until my hair swept ground, until the ground was sky, asking roots and leaves, our house, the horses, asking all of it to remember me. ...