Poetry
SPRING 2021Wild Horse Island, August 2020
by MERCEDES LAWRY
We walk through cheatgrass fractioned
across fields, past dust pits where horses dream.
Encircled by mountains impressed upon a soft blue
we hear a loop of osprey cries.
Down by the cabin, horses may arrive
or bighorn sheep, thirsty and slow.
The mule deer stay close, grazing or lying
in a pool of shade, almost invisible.
We are here briefly, fleeing the world
as if the dung-scattered trails
could take us somewhere safe,
as if the unanchored stars in the night sky
could provide untroubled sleep.
Mercedes Lawry
Mercedes Lawry is the author of Small Measures, which won the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Prize from Twelve Winters Press, and three chapbooks; the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. Mercedes’s work has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize and her fiction was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. Additionally, she’s published stories and poems for children. She lives in Seattle.