Witness Magazine

to you horse

By
Poetry•Vol. XXXI No. 3 (Winter 2018)

to you horse
Sappho 87F

 

the backslash of boundary unjust

and not only for its drainage

of green

 

California the fingers

sustaining the weight of pressing nation

its back in knotted muscle

claims all the names of proximity

Oceanside, — Beach, — Beach, — Beach

 

meanwhile what of Tucson and hubris

ranging deeper

our mountains all the bodies

holding yarn cat’s cradle over the desert

where maybe a hare looks skyward once

and wonders if the strings flying

over the peaks will this

time mean water or air

Kate Partridge
Kate Partridge is the author of the poetry collection Ends of the Earth (U. of Alaska Press, 2017) and two hybrid chapbooks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Pleiades, Colorado Review, Yale Review, and other journals. She is a graduate fellow at the University of Southern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature, and she co-edits Switchback Books.