A Horse from the Merry-Go-Round

by Rose Lemberg

There's a wooden horse under the pavement
in the subway station, and it stares
                              in the darkness,
peeled eyes blind
          as the concrete wind rushes,
     ceases,
              exhales a red girl in a glittering dress -
she walks past,
             talks too fast,


                            and a boy
      with the fiddle case swinging
         he sings
        her love back.


The old horse stares on -
             caresses melt easy
      through cracks in the ears
                      long after love's gone.


Now it dances
where the gray suits are waiting for winds -
              can you hear the horse singing?
           it sways
    like a Broadway diva
                         on two hollow feet.



Rose Lemberg received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and now teaches Nostalgic and Marginal Studies somewhere in the Midwest. Her office is a cavern with no windows. When nobody's looking, the walls glint with diamonds or perhaps tears, and the fiddlers dance inside the books. Rose's poems appeared or are forthcoming in GUD, Abyss and Apex, Mythic Delirium, and Star*line. Rose doesn't know why she writes. She likes to take walks in the darkness, when the stars call out to each other; they speak in triangles and squares. Although Rose feels most at home in the great cities, she lives in a small town. She sometimes writes in her LiveJournal.

When asked to state which poem the word "cherry" immediately makes her think of, she said, "the word 'cherry' reminds me of the poem 'In Your Absence' by Judith Harris -- I even blogged it recently."


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