The Mare of Money

Another dead mare waits in the shoals of some body of water, waits to be burden, borne into a foaming ocean, where it might become food for whales, or, simply empty signifier—hair latched to the sea’s undulation like Absalom’s beauty caught in the playful branches of a tree desiring union, entanglement, thick confusion— but not this mare; she does not get the luxury of a lyric—a song that makes our own undoing or killing sweet even as we go down into the fire to rise as smoke. This horse must lie, eyes open, amongst the stones and fresh water crawfish in Money, Mississippi, listen to the men’s boots break the water as they drop a black boy’s body near her head, pick him up, only to let him fall again there: bent and eye-to-eye with her as though decaying is something that requires a witness —as though the mare might say: on Tuesday after the rain fell, the boy’s neck finally snapped from the weight of the mill fan; he never looked at me again.