My Forelock to the Ground, by Lisa Segal

Follow the Wild, Blue Pony, by Trine Churchill (USA, b. Denmark) 2019. Click image for artist website.

My Forelock to the Ground

My gestures summon forces at the outermost feather 
of what I understand. I’m a thistle seeking salvation, 
complexity yearning to be elemental. 
I’m not sure who I invoke as my arms circle 
at my sides, like wings.  
I kneel and fold. 
My forelock touches the ground.  
I rise and do it again. 
 
Not wanting to remain singular,  
wounded by isolation, wishing to merge,  
I lurch and rumble,  
trundling through my years,  
chasing beauty 
with what grace I can.   
 
I lift my hand and touch the back of my neck.  
I don’t know, yet, the way of this container, 
how it came, where it goes. 
Each day, I leave enough room  
for night to pin me to my bed. 
                                                                                                              
In the blink of my eye,  
on either side of the snap of my fingers, 
all I see spins and flips.  
 
I’m high-desert dust  
coating the nostrils of a horse  
loose at midnight 
rearing up beneath a traffic light  
that swings in the wind.   
 
From whence this horse?   
This wide black-topped road? 
This wind? 
I’m the shape of clay without water. 
 
I kneel and fold.                                                                       
I rise and do it again. 

Lisa Segal

Lisa Segal is a Los Angeles poet, writer, and artist. She has published two poetry and prose collections--Kicking Towards the Deep End (2020) andMetamorphosis: Who is the Maker? An Artist’s Statement (2014)—and a textbook: Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: The Brush-Up. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals and won prizes in poetry contests. She teaches Method Writing through the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective and is a member of StudioEleven, a Los Angeles artist collective. Website: www.lisasegal.com.  
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