Mag Gabbert
—
Mare
a fully mature female horse
or other equine animal
the year I measured my body
with my dog’s locking leash
before cutting out pieces
from a black velvet spool
any of several
dark plains on the moon
which Galileo believed could be seas
from the Proto-Indo-European root mer
also seen in ambrosia manticore immortal
morbid morsel and remorse
the day a horse
broke its leg in front of me
then lay flat as a shadow
while my boyfriend raised
and aimed his father’s rifle
in Sanskrit mer forms crushes or bruises
in Persian man in Hittite to disappear
or vanish
the time my class took a field trip
to a Greek Orthodox Church
and I cried hysterically
beside the altar
Latin term meaning body
of water
when the priest told me men
were always made in God’s image
but girls only developed
into negatives
an illusory discovery or trick
one time I believed the word equine
meant aquatic
in Armenian mer forms dying
in Old English it’s murder
a bad woman or rabbit
at recess a boy once said I ran
as if my life didn’t depend on it
the well-known process
of training young horses
otherwise known as breaking
a she-goblin or incubus
in Greek to extinguish
the horse-headed Demeter
who was the goddess of harvest
but then
became the goddess of grief
Mag Gabbert holds a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University and an MFA from The University of California at Riverside. Her essays and poems can be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Thrush, The Massachusetts Review, Waxwing, The Pinch and many other journals. She is the author of Minml Poems, a chapbook of visual poetry and nonfiction (Cooper Dillon Books, 2020), and she’s received poetry fellowships from Idyllwild Arts and Poetry at Round Top. She teaches creative writing at Southern Methodist University and serves as the interviews editor for Underblong Journal.
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