UPON READING THAT FRUIT FLIES AGE FASTER ONCE THEY HAVE SEEN DEATH
Horse girls have money,
a former student tells me with assurance
the same day I read about the flies.
He is stroking the mustang I adopted for $25
from the U.S. government five years ago,
and I think with sudden shock, He means me.
I have been so lost in worry about paying the bills
that it is astonishing to remember how charmed this life is,
how free and lovely these fields.
I’m ashamed of myself, of how easily I forgot that I am privileged
once I saw myself so far beyond repair,
health squandered, with no savings left, no retirement coming,
and the lean time that terrifies me seems so near.
But it’s not here yet. Isn’t that the sort of hope
many others are denied?
I have a home filled with marvelous gifts,
but all I can do is despair about losing it.
Oh, forgive me for such forgetfulness.
You see, I used to work in bookkeeping
and I have done the math to reconcile this,
again and again, just as people do who justify anything.
It’s been over a year since I ate food I didn’t cook myself.
I don’t travel. I don’t drink alcohol.
I don’t go to movies or concerts or conferences or shows.
I bought my phone well-used several years ago.
Most of my possessions, I got for free
in exchange for an honest review.
I don’t have health insurance.
I cut my own hair. I didn’t have children.
I didn’t have children. A horse, then, is a hold on the world.
When I was a teller I lived in my car
so that I could afford the board for one.
Googling what horse girl means,
I wonder how many versions of it there are.
I wonder if we all have our own version of poor, too,
which, like love, can differ wildly from another’s.
For seven years in my youth, this is what I learned:
you can get so fed up of bargain ramen
you can no longer keep it down,
and that is a waste of ramen.
Truck stops have showers anyone can use.
Malnourishment makes for ugly toenails,
which is especially frustrating
when the only affordable shoes are flip-flops.
Pawn shops deal in well, it’s better than nothings.
If you make friends with a supermarket manager in a small town,
he’ll give you the box of hamburger patties that were returned
after customers complained they tasted of kerosene.
Yes, even those days, I knew deep down
I had more than what I needed.
It was the gluttony of ramen that made me sick.
A gluttony of meat. A gluttony of prayer.
I’m ashamed to admit that even having known plenty
I still don’t know what enough is,
only what it isn’t. What I want is more,
always more. I tell myself I want only enough to be safe.
How much would that take? God help me.
The safest sound in the universe
is the click and whoosh of central heat.
One day in New Mexico I held a skinny black horse
so that my first husband could shoot it in the forehead
with a gun he borrowed from the neighbor.
We used to get problem horses dirt cheap,
train them and resell them.
This horse had been there for just two weeks
before we learned he carried 40 pounds of sand in his gut,
gathered from years of eating hay thrown on the desert ground
by whoever had owned him longest.
That is the carelessness of hunger.
It comes from another carelessness.
When that man grew weary of our violent and famished lives,
family loaned me the money to file for divorce
and bankruptcy, which are also luxuries.
Debt is necessary to discharge a greater debt.
Did you know, if you give a horse too much to eat,
the horse will kill himself gorging on it?
You can yearn for what you have while you wait to lose it.
It’s difficult not to feel sorry for yourself
while hating yourself for feeling sorry for yourself.
Damn it all. And that’s just the way it is:
The skin, the teeth, the toenails,
the importance of appearances.
Of youth, which can do anything,
you assume, at first; it seems so wide and wealthy,
but it only saves up what little it can,
if it can save anything at all, and that runs out too soon.
Your credit cards all charge annual fees,
if you’re lucky enough to get credit cards.
You make the minimum payment while the balance grows.
You get used to living on credit alone,
which one day runs out, too.
Desperation is such a hard habit to get rid of.
Around here, so many are losing homes to flooding and to storms,
but not me, not yet, and yet—
Horse girl, horse girl!
What a luxury it is, of course, even to try to name
what it is that matters most.
To choose what to sacrifice,
even while believing more is never coming.
Please forgive these trespasses, these unkindnesses
and excesses and stinginesses.
The secret closets of almost-empty bottles
I can’t throw away because they can change the way a world looks.
Ask any mare that has been hitched to a cart
what this all means.
See how she stands flicking the biting flies
with her tail while she waits,
wearing the blinders which are meant to keep her
from learning what she is attached to.
Meant to keep her from fearing whatever dark box it is
that is rolling, rolling, rolling, so
inextricably behind her.
—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
__________
Chera Hammons: “This poem is the result of a weird confluence of events. Since I read the fruit fly article, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I’ve wondered what traumas I have that I don’t know I’m showing. And I thought about how difficult it is to escape trauma, how it changes a person, just as it changed the flies. And how many traumas there must be in the world.” (web)
