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  • Once a Horse Danced the Can-Can, and: The First Refuses to Sing So Sings
  • Eliza Rotterman (bio)

Once a Horse Danced the Can-Can

I awoke in the modern sense the clock quipped, morning ripened I clicked the image of late summer falling to bruise and rot.

I thought a circle is the shape of light obsessing its object but I stepped in, forgot traffic changes state: solids turn liquid, colloidal. Inscrutable oily dots we resist what we know to be true.

What else to do but lean in?      O mind you read the map the body composes as sadness      an axis around which hands pine. Hue to hue, today we walk like lovers, orbiteers of a question unzipped. What else to do but dance loss to the quick. [End Page 158]

The First Refuses to Sing So Sings

In a hutch I spooned rabbit stew, wrote a letter on the tame one’s ear

the wild one I left for the fox, the mute appetite of snow.

I sketched meadows stacked like sedimentary rock. Regions

of the brain, horses bitten to run intractably back to fire.

I knew by scent your body’s sly marauding. Peeled fruit wetting the palm,

mineral taste on the tongue. I was young, impetuous.

I touched it twice and twice it bit to keep me nestled close. [End Page 159]

Eliza Rotterman

Eliza Rotterman’s poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Zoland, Interim, Fourteen Hills, and Poetry International. She has co-hosted on the Portland-based podcast “Late Night Library.” Recently she was awarded the Kay Evans fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is studying nurse midwifery.

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