High Horse

(untitled), Michael Northrup

I can never tell a crow from a raven
Just like I can never tell a man from a boy.

Alice Gamble on the tracks.
I watch Her hair 
an ashen flag thrashing
in January’s maw
Waiting for the smoke to clear

She guides her mangy cat on a leash
Proud stride like she’s at the reigns of a thoroughbred 

He got her on her knees but it was I who dealt the blow, 
Swung the axe
Severed clean and pure 
Her neurotic spirit
Her house wrapped in plastic
And the oven on
Kittens lapping up milk left in porcelain bowls

Only two days gone,
He took me into their bed 
And fucked me where she once lay 
Cleaved the memory of her weight from its coils
With each fierce thrust the groans of the spectre below 
I choke on her name, his rough palms around my throat 
Squeezing like a lemon and sucking sour pulp 
Stuck in his teeth, opens wide my mouth and spits me out viscous and hot 
A butcher in bed

I came to murder his
Sweet saddle-shooed sophomore
I, his Jewess, his vamp, his many-tongued mistress,
A lover of unreason and an exile
Thrice-married, her perfect foil
In gold bangles

Only I can sate you, filthy brute 
Stop your philandering and sink into my canals
Of musky origin 

So he drafts his constitution
Bound by desperation, not matrimony
I rear their children,
Play pretend the nights he’s gone

And the mornings he gets off 
at Chalk Farm
Where he thought he saw once through fingerprint and spray paint
Her gamine ghost disappear down that tunnel

Purge her or we’ll never make it through.

In the kitchen of Flat #3
She will be our reckoning
Our daughter, four years 
Unborn
To whom you gave not even your name.

Odelia Wu is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in SPECTRA, Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @chronically_injured