Soft Leather Reins
Chase Twichell

Soft Leather Reins

Soft leather reins, dark brown,
just bridle and bareback,
light rain, radiant woods.

Later the horses tangled
with some barbed wire,
but we freed them.

Sound: inchworms feeding,
their droppings falling.
Shots, but far off.

Sally and I rode through childhood
together. We got home at dusk.
There my knowledge ends.

Chase Twichell

is the author, most recently, of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon 2010), which won both the Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She splits the year between the Adirondacks and Miami Beach.