Assistant Editor Maggie Su: The first line in Erin Slaughter’s poem “No Horses” is an answer to an unasked question: “Because giving pleasure is less vulnerable / than receiving.” In a tangle of image and interruption, the poem circles an unspoken force. What comes into focus is the effects, the ripples—the ways in which love and hunger conflate and how deprivation distorts the speaker’s vision of compassion. In the perfect last line, Slaughter’s speaker offers a declaration that splits the poem open at its center.
To hear Erin read her poem, click below:
No Horses
Because giving pleasure is less vulnerable
than receiving. Like animals in the underbrush
scuffing for hours in the barren dirt
for fruit: perhaps we seek in sacrifice
a kind of safety. That mirage
sealed with ore, to be loved, meaning
hollowed until solved. And measured
in penitent seasons: sallow in my shame
costume, gnawing the chicken bones
hidden in the side of the mattress he refuses
to crawl to. I’ve spent a life testing how many
men I could stuff in my mouth until one swam
their way to the laughing wound. Or said Thank you.
Or fed me dense bright spoonfuls
of salt. Who taught us love is an arrow
whose harsh jaw we aim at ourselves. No horses
prize splitting their hooves this way. A girlhood sealed
by deprivation’s bronze tongue gives compassion
a chemical taste. Silverfish, choose yourself
a sunken thing. It is worse to survive someone kind.
Erin Slaughter is editor/cofounder of The Hunger, and author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine and elsewhere. She lives in Tallahassee.
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