In Spacehorse you do not have to be stone.
You’ve buried a horse one too many to be
set in stone. Others bury to transform.
The most hopeful don’t. They leave
the reins you need
to let go. I won’t
erase our tracks. Soft ground like stone shuffles.
Like why wolves knot. Like running won’t whittle
away a wound. My feet : shot, dear
& open. What lets eternity loose
like lead. Axed &. Unsoothed. I can’t
escape. Not all impressions
fade. Sometimes you die
from complications— or persist for years,
& then silence in bottled-up thunder & bang.
Sometimes all you can say is “wait.” Over
&. Over. There are vacant stone
houses you could break
during sunrise. They reek
of rotting balsam trees,
& you’d give anything to rest,
knowing someone condemned them
long before you met— & the truth about you
is that once you’ve loved
greatly, that love is set
in stone
& so much more desirable
to vandals who inscribe
upon you that death
was once natural
before the need for burials.
Here, no one will tell you.
The first doctor you see only predicts
so much scar tissue will make love
difficult. The whole time he speaks
quietly in the how & when
best you leave.
& boundaries change
constantly, you tell a specialist,
who asks you to reach
into further recesses: the pogroms
in Russia & then Poland,
that your father’s family fled
& the shame they still impress
as if you descend not from survivors
but fugitives.
Like taking those first steps.
All over again. You have no sense.
How you did it. & now, trying to perfect
what once came naturally. Before it was set
in shuffle. Better to forget. & silence
from scratch. If you can.
I can’t.
& that’s not it.
Has nothing to do
with it, anyway.
Here I now descend
from my assailant who returns
at dim & woolly hours to clean up
demolition. I chip away & flint,
carving him
from a distance.
When our eyes lock,
all I see in his is akin
to my own ire & din : you aren’t
&
wait.
Almost
perfect symmetry
is not symmetry at all. I don’t think I was chosen
over those who die in such rubble. Here, they say
assault has degrees
when all of us remain
defaced. Now I shamble through
cemeteries. You won’t receive answers to these questions. My feet
will give in. Etching. Stone. Thrown until swollen &.
Dazed. Taken. & taking.
Until Dust.
&. Retch—
You will not rot away.
In Spacehorse, you will be renamed.
Rest your head in soft starhorse thunder without thinking
of what you’re doing. You’ll never have to wish
how you could do it again.
Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author ofturn around, BRXGHT XYXS(Get Fresh Books, 2019). Her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears in Black Warrior Review (2020), is part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets, which she began in 2019, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. She is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, Hayden’s Ferry Review,, among others. In 2017, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Recently, her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. She’s part of the 2018 QUEENSBOUND project, and took part in The Onassis Foundation’s 2020 ENTER exhibition. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog.
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