Grant, 1970

When you were twelve & your horse reared up, uprooting the wooden stake from soft soil & how she came down on it. How her belly split open like a great bag of feed. You were small enough to fit underneath her & you tried to push her spilling organs back into her, pushing up, up, up on loose hide, an attic door that would not shut. And the blood warmed your head & she shifted her weight & you were too afraid to move so you stayed like that, arms raised overhead & Dundee was dying, yes, she was going to die, her intestines tumbling, ribboning red & you tried not to look, eyes cast wide as fishing nets you tried not to look—

Tessa Livingstone is a young Southern Californian poet who holds an MFA from Portland State University. She enjoys engaging the transformative and macabre in her poems, which have previously appeared in Capulet Mag, Five:2:One Magazine, Geometry Literary Journal, Whiskey Island Magazine, and Portland Review. You can find her on Twitter @livingstonepoet.