And the Stars in Their Mouths

That was the summer
the ginger mares lazed

in the pasture past dusk
resisting our urgings,

their sleek backs turned to us,
manes lifted, tails
bowed in prayer.          It will take

three tries before their silky muzzles
surrender to our sugary bribes,

before we guide their high-carried grace
to these hushed, familiar stalls.

Once we’re gone,

they will nibble hay, guzzle
water. They will become, again,

dreamers twitching their imagined
wings.             But for now, the sinewy

smell of thunder, the cadence
of downpour.              And above us,

another world of wilder

horses that plume
into constellations that know

how to wait, that know
to love this broken night.

This Coming Home to the Absences

Back home celosia’s plumes. Isn’t that
            what hope is, too?—an upward spire.
                        While we were gone, familiar plants
                                    turned curiously foreign.
Clematis purpled, coreopsis overarched. The long
            pods began to rust and dangle from redbud
                        branches. And I worried about
                                    what will really last—our summer’s
pleasured ease? Our heat and swale? Far away from here,
            we looked, together. Two dolphins, three,
                        soon five—paralleling the horizon line.
                                    It seemed impossible, then,
to see that water won’t always be there to hammer
            shells into daggers, then scrub them to dust.
                        We are a long way now, aren’t we,
                                    from the deepening sea?

Sandra Fees has been published in SWWIM, Nimrod, River Heron Review, Harbor Review, Witness and elsewhere and has work forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Moon City Review and other journals. The author of the chapbook, The Temporary Vase of Hands, she lives in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Published April 15 2023