“You Are Here” by Lia Greenwell (poetry ’13)
An excerpt from “You Are Here” by Lia Greenwell (poetry ’13) published at the Kenyon Review Online.
You Are Here
Once, as a child, I was playing hide and seek at a house out in the country. We hid in old outbuildings. We were running, ducking under fences, crawling. When I finally stood up and looked around, I was in the horse’s pen. The horse, colossal and brown with dark, knobby joints, looked at me. When I began to walk away, to find some exit, the horse followed. As I began to run, the horse galloped after me. Sprinting around a barn toward the widest part of the pasture, bordered by an electric fence, I saw I was too short to jump over it. I had to jump through, the wires buzzing around me. I landed in a hard tangle on the ground, breathless. The horse looked at me stock-still from the other side.
Once, I could slip out of my body and into the shelter of my mind as easily as a wet fish from a hand.
