Let a double portion of your spirit be upon me

Allisa Cherry

Just before I left that town for good you and I stood
knock-kneed in the front yard. I crimped your forelock

with a curling iron plugged into an extension cord
and snaked through a rip in the screen door

for your last Pioneer Day Parade. Placid broken by years
of labor you let me press my eye so near to yours

all I could see was a resolute darkness. In that moment
I thought we might worship the same god which is to say

I felt we were both shying away from the dilation
at the center of an undefined spook. Everything you were

saddled with: every cruel rider kicking calf thrown shoe
and even me the computer programmer’s daughter

who once wanted to prove she could drive fifty head of cattle
across the mal pais and slapped the rein across your withers

I hoped one day you could forget it all and become only speed
and the bend in the landscape froth and flank a shiver between

the short and long pastern the matte of your
elegant bones finally resting cleansed by sunlight.

Allisa Cherry’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, TriQuarterly Review, The Maine Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Rust + Moth, High Desert Journal, and The Account. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she completed her MFA at Pacific University, teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to a life in the United States, and is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review.