Only Once Driving to Cincinnati by Kirk Schlueter

It’s a sin to call the horses beautiful
but they were, their hooves a miracle
flaring fire with each beat—

I shouldn’t remember it this way,
but it was August. Or December.
Creepers choked trashcans & stucco,

the sweetgums on her street falling
so that in waking you went to your car
& brushed loose a fist of stars,

slender & sharp to draw blood. 
It was October, or March, & I was falling
out of love, telling myself I wasn’t,

pretending the hummingbird’s plum crest
isn’t a gunshot in the dark. 
Year of late springs & long summers,

one hundred degrees in autumn & sunlight
smashing through windows like Molotovs.
I drove east twice a month & could feel

the earth lurching beneath me, chasing
the last light at eighteen miles a second.
But only once the horses, only once

their roan manes stippled by rain.
It was February, or November,
the river’s black ribbon slalomed 

between the slouched hills of Kentucky
& the hunched slopes of Ohio,
& I’m sorry to say again it isn’t like the movies,

there are no grand arguments scored to strings
or plates crashing against baseboards & walls,
no voices that rise unbidden like flames

from the oven’s mouth to announce now,
now you don’t love her. Some nights I stopped
on the bridge & stuck my head out far			

over the rail. The river choked by chicken bones 
& Coke cans, barbed wire & mercury, & I think now
I thought it could sweep away everything,

even the small bells time is made of,
the bells that chime when a man falls asleep
& the one next to him twines hair

around their finger asking if, if…
It was January, the river frozen black,
Cincinnati’s lights hanging like bells

in some shining city under the ice.
She asked if I was a coward,
& I have waited a long time to say yes. 

It was April, the road turned to rain,
& at first I didn’t notice the truck’s swing
or how the trailer slung wider still. 

It hiccupped, is as clear as I can say it, 
metal shearing off metal, the trailer lurching 
across two lanes before the doors tumbled open

& the horses ran onto the highway—
ran for that perfect moment on rain & air,
their hooves a miracle of fire, flaring blue.

I never told her. Never told anyone. 
Not over lavender ice cream,
not the last morning when sunlight crashed

through the windows & the air between us
turned to flame. It’s a sin to call the horses
beautiful, & wrong to speak of love only

as ash & charnel. As something that ends
& wastes. It was May, & she scrunched
her face into my chest, a smile of make-up

plastered across my shirt. If you have
even a knife of mercy, let me end here:
not metal’s scream on asphalt, but the horses—running.

Kirk Schlueter received his MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois-University Carbondale, where his masters thesis was named Outstanding Graduate Thesis in 2017. His poetry has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council award, the 2018 Frontier Prize for New Poets, judged by Victoria Chang, and has been a finalist for the Jake Adam York Book Prize and the Indiana Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, RHINO, Diode, Nimrod, River Styx, Passages North, Grist, Frontier Poetry, Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, Natural Bridge, The Pinch, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Connotation Press among others.

6 January 2024