Miriam Sagan
Winter Count
you can start
the story
from the center
spiral out
horses rush
across painted hide
of this year’s war
the power
of just
touching the enemy
with a finger
I’m a girl
I don’t know
how to start
with this
I’m not that girl, still
oh yes
I am
I’m not going to tell you
every terrifying thing
that ever
happened to me
my maternal grandmother
sees the child
next to her trampled to death
by horsemen
what shall we do?
get on a boat
head west
to Ellis Island
horses again
out of Central Asia
red or green
not the blue ones
of dreams
I never drank
anything at a party
I never left
any woman I knew
behind
drunk or asleep
I didn’t wear
a bra
in New York City
and got chased
down a side street
I gave the finger
and ran
really fast
I’m still running
breathless
I promised myself
I’d say
no more than this
I just took a Greyhound bus
west
massacre to massacre
star to star
invisible lines
imaginary borders
what is possessed
what can’t be owned
drawn
on this body
of earth.
Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). Winner of the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2017. Her blog, Miriam’s Well, has a thousand daily readers. She has been a writer in residence in two national parks, at Yaddo, MacDowell, Colorado Art Ranch, Andrew’s Experimental Forest, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Iceland’s Gullkistan Residency for creative people, and another dozen or so remote and unique places. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.