Thrush Poetry Journal
  • ARCHIVES
  • SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

Kristin Robertson
​

Portrait of Love as Carousel
 
Fairground organ, barnacled
          with cherubs, all kiddie baroque,
 
and I’m going nowhere, gasping.
          Marionetted up and down in a canon
 
of show ponies. Most worth-its
          in life are cyclical: Lunar phases.
 
Wurlitzer beats. At every seventh second,
          the blur of a single evergreen.
 
Circadian rhythm. In a London museum,
          the Clock of the Long Now.
 
My horse is a fragile hundred years old
          and refurbished, gentle enough
 
to flash me its teeth. Gums and bridle, pink
          and bejeweled. It gallops Sobre
 
las Olas. Wind in my face, eyes blown closed.

          I grip tighter, tighter the gold rope.




Kristin Robertson is the author of Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Threepenny Review, and Five Points. She can be found at www.kristin-robertson.com.




Return to November 2019 Edition