Chris Souza

Making Horses

Each no more than a foot tall, and so uniform
one can almost see the whole wet assemblage:
newsprint, paper towel tubes, and brushes fat
with paint. Eager work, bringing into being
that model on teacher’s desk. And the result:
the blue horse nose to nose with the fawn, one
yellow, two dappled gray, and brown everywhere.
The art center’s closed today, so there’s no matching
a particular child with the one horse whose ears perk up,
or a thick-fingered boy with the low-cheeked one.
There’s nothing but to feel the pulse from those few
pieces attentive beyond proportion, rendering
a question or something given off, as if to answer
a little wind that could stir us dobbins to life.

Chris Souza

holds an MA in creative writing from Boston University and lives in Massachusetts. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and has appeared in Gulf Coast, Connecticut Review, Salt Hill, New York Quarterly, American Literary Review, and New Delta Review, among others, and is forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Lake Effect.