Mare's Nest

The human characters in Holly Mitchell’s Mare’s Nest are largely overshadowed by her magnificent horses. Whether drawing attention to sounds—“of the warble fly / nested under skin, / making a whistler / of the riding horse”—or depicting a horse who “appears almost / elegant, ewe-necked / but fescue-footed,” these poems immerse readers in the world of Kentucky horse breeding, a bodily world of afterbirth and syringes, of “Regu-mate / with cracked corn.”

A colt-stallion escapes, “taking the pregnant mares in the summer, / through their sutures,” while power dynamics among mares emerge in “turning out” the herd from barn to pasture. “[T]he new alpha” asserts herself with her body:

sixteen hands tall, built
for running distance. She hasn’t
given birth or let go
of her sense of order yet.
Through the field she chases
mares she once knew,
foals she has smelled
but never been permitted
to touch.

Raised in this world centered around labor, both human and animal, the speaker watches her parents aid the birthing broodmares they board during “[t]hat spring we lost the most,” and drives a “Stillborn filly” “to the equine morgue with (the corpse) under a tarp / in the bed of Dad’s pickup.” She observes her father by turns lash a horse and try to nurse “a fawn whose neck is broken.”

Sex and death and violence are everywhere, and so are men, asserting power, as the adult speaker pieces together the gender dynamics she has been schooled in. In “Separations,” a vet detects “a shadow / on his monitor” that suggests a

pregnancy
              could be twins
                            one to be pinched
                                          for the other’s health

                            an abortion
                                          that Southern men
                                          think nothing of—

An ex insists on pissing in “the barn/where I work. He marks // the straw like a colt would / without thinking yes or no,” and the speaker, aligned with the mares, turns to the “past-due mare”:

I put my nose before hers
& breathe in like a horse.

It’s bad husbandry.
She could kill me like this,

but she sniffs so readily
as if she couldn’t wait to talk.