What you have to know is that vines and wires look the same. Old fenceposts look like slim young trees. This used to be someone’s land; if you dig through the sumac and blackberries, there’s always a wall of stones, a grave, a hearth. So anywhere you walk, you’re tripping on something. You’re on a horse short-cutting through the brush along a steep creekbank then crossing down into the water, thinking you’ll climb up the other side and suddenly be on another trail. But buried in the vines is barbed wire still wrapped around two posts that fell over so long ago that they look like innocent broken branches half covered in the bushes that took them down. Smell of deep brown mud, dark glossy leaves of vines. When the horse’s back leg trips on the wires, the wires wake up, the fenceposts hold; they won’t let the horse past this line, and the fence drags up from its green burial as the horse squeals and kicks the leg and the wires slash their teeth, bite deeper, through skin and tendon and down to bone. The horse, teetering on three legs, falls into the creek, the last leg still snared in wires, a horse hanging by one leg, shoulder in mud, head in the water, his rider jumping off just before her leg rolls under his ribs. Now she’s stumbling on stones in the water, then mud, then throwing herself back up the slope to free his leg. That sound—the horse’s strangled scream, as shocking as a cough expelling something from deep in the body. He kicks and thrashes as she pulls two wires—one below, one above the big cannon bone, the top one sunk in bloody meat, and the horse kicks free and his body slides down the rest of the way into the creek and he staggers to his knees, then his feet, and stands there with the water rushing through him, past, every part of him dripping. Shivering as if cold. But it’s summer. The first day without school. The girl, the rider, stands with him in the creek. The horse holds up the one back leg, touching the tip of the hoof down into the water, then pulling it up again, as if trying to step into a bath too hot. A wound like a wide mouth swelling, dividing the leg between what still circulates and what may be cut off. The afternoon hovering. Sunlight cut into long pieces and hanging in dusty air.
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Amy Miller’s full-length poetry collection, The Trouble with New England Girls, won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in Oregon and works for a theatre festival.