What does a horse do / with a beautiful broken / neck?
—Maram Al-Massari

It doesn’t eat
out of your hand anymore. It doesn’t
slip sweetly into a standing sleep.
It spits up
and we have to start again. It dreams
of a thousand bees in the field
where it is not roaming. It dreams
of sweet honey water,
so we do our best. We try
to get the mixture right.
In the end, it’s never right
and we have to apologize. We have to
soak pears and oranges and apples
in water, and we have to
pretend this is the same as honey.
But its tongue is a loose, broken machine,
slipping in and out, frustrated
by its mistakes and the honey
that spills on the ground.
It watches us cry. It watches us
cry and doesn’t understand
why we’d waste the water.
It wants to crack
open sugar cubes in its field mouth, and so do I.
It wants to see a dense, green lake
but only if we lead it in
sweetly. It turns the idea over
in its head like a heavy rock
in a bright, clean field.
It wants to be back
in a field, even just to sit.
It wants to be lifted
and spun in the wind
like those happily lost seeds with the wings,
which it used to pluck from the air
with its mouth. It wants to be carried
by a bee, carried a hundred miles
and poured over an unfamiliar field.
It wants to be given
to others, to supply other bodies, to be wiped
happily from a greedy mouth.
It wants to do better than we have done.

KATHERINE LAMB is a poet, educator, and collagist from Texas. She recently earned her MFA in poetry from Texas State University, where she now teaches. She was a Juried Poet for the 2017 Houston Poetry Fest and returned as a Featured Poet in 2018. Her poem, “A Daughter Goes to Work,” was a finalist for Nimrod Journal’s 2018 Emerging Poets Prize. Several of her “Chorus” poems were published in Tupelo Quarterly's seventeenth issue and one was chosen by New South Magazine as a finalist for their 2019 prize. You can find her online at @KatherineMLamb.