All Talk
I wanted to write a poem about your voice, how you spoke as
if there were a barn burning behind me, and only you could
see it. Instead I started writing about horses, which I thought
could somehow carry the feeling. But horses are inattentive.
They oversleep and nibble on each other’s fetlocks. And
horses in poems are another thing altogether. Having
accumulated and obviated their meadows, they can only
rhizome, which explains prehistoric horse, headless horse,
and man-dressed-as-horse—all excerpts from earlier drafts.
The kitchen drawer confounded by this wild stack. And yes,
at one point, one of them ate another, I think, for eating the
littlest, and no, I can’t begin to tell them what I’ve lost.
TYLER WAGNER's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, Salt Hill, The Pinch, and elsewhere. His poem “Endless Savings” was selected by Eduardo Corral as the winner of Quarterly West’s 2023 Contest in Poetry. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.