black beauty
- black beauty
"A runaway horse that bolted from its owner in Germantown, crashed into a car, and injured its occupants before leading authorities on a nearly two-mile chase … Princess, a 6-year-old mare, was treated for lacerations to its front shoulder and its rear hock …"
--The Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/11/08
look—like fugitive buckshotlike a silent, stutterin reellike a mad black masshollerin down greene streetcareens into a pt cruiserdares the bus to bruise herwithout whinny or wain
reins free of armsflanked by rubber & tarrear-jerk bone-narrow sidewalkturned blood gravel, crowd gatherschurch revival blatherscreams like tambourinessalt & pepper senioropen mouth drinkin etheroperator say the horseprobably from hansberry
(i remember a mare i rode in the jungle& the shange girl with blonde braidsstraddlin a colt45 of moonshine down morris)
look,like fugitive buckshotlike a silent, stutterin reellike a mad black mass,i wanted to lasso her waist& ride [End Page 36]
Yolanda Wisher (yolandaj@gfsnet.org) received an MA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Temple University. In 1999, she was named the first poet laureate of Montgomery County. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Meridians, Fence, nocturnes, and Chain, as well as the anthologies Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, The Fence Reader, and Lavanderia. A Cave Canem fellow, Wisher teaches English at Germantown Friends School and chairs the Germantown Poetry Festival. She is also the host of "umüvme" (you-move-me), a poetry internet radio show on www.gtownradio.com.
