Dark Horse

By Kristina Marie Darling

Issue 33 • Spring 2016 • Poetry

They didn’t expect me to carry you back to this room. Here,
all the dishes are locked away. What I meant was, I didn’t say a
thing about the other wife when they asked, I just tore out the
bad tooth

Husband, I know my dress isn’t the first to catch fire. You
see, even the buttons down the back of my neck were a
declaration:

First harbor, last ship,

Your voice still clings like
rusted nail. I’ve wanted to
tell you this, so sit down and
let me finish.

Every night, the film just keeps playing, and
when the hall darkens, I hear you whispering to
her in the projection booth

Between frames, that shuddering in the stable. But the rider
has long since left the track.

You can see a small break in the widening dusk—

(It is far from any of the houses
we would know.)

Kristina Maria Darling

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books of poetry. Her awards include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund. Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, The Mid-American Review, The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is currently working toward both a Ph.D. in Literature at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo and an M.F.A. in Poetry at New York University.

Lawrence Eby

Lawrence Eby is the author of two books of poetry, Flight of August, winner of the 2014 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and Machinist in the Snow, ELJ Publications 2015. His work can be found in Forklift, Passages North, Fourteen Hills, Superstition Review, and others. He is the editor in chief of Orange Monkey Publishing, a poetry press in California. This is his first time publishing photos.