A fictiony non-fiction prose poem to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse

The Year of the Fire Horse tells me I should move boldly, so in celebration of this, I’m taking a one-off break from my usual sobriety content to share some art — as noted in the title, a prose poem involving the Shackleford Horses with questionable emotional and historical accuracy:

“The Wild Carolina Coast Horses of Shackleford Banks are Declining in Population.”
Junior Ranger Wild Horse Protector Report, July 2023

1

The Banks, accessible only by boat. It is recommended that visitors check for live organisms within collected shells. The horses, churning after shipwreck, or sinking as Virginia Woolf did. That soft, delicious enveloping. The horses, now wild, adapted to Shackleford Banks’ harsh habitat and learned to drink fresh water by stomping their hooves into the sand. This is imagining a singular shipwreck on a sunny day. A calm, blue day. As if the mast just snapped. Then the horses, and the men, treading. The clinking of the rocks in Woolf’s apron pockets — or was it a dress? Or are those rocks an urban legend, a thing my AP English professor wanted me to know, if I became too hungry for a room of my own? In 2024, two four-year-old females were euthanized. Diagnosis: failure to thrive. Spring can be an interesting time when the horses become more territorial and the stallions can be expected to be frequently at odds with each other.

2

Shackleford is my grandmother’s family name. The family crest, a horse. My daddy was a scoundrel, my grandmother would say. Is Z still fat, she asks, six days before she dies. As we write my grandfather’s obituary, she critiques my draft: Cut lovely. He didn’t have a lovely wife. He just had a wife. Adverbs are cheap. And I don’t disagree. Later we learn what made her father -- my great-grandfather -- a scoundrel, aside from the drink: he impregnated his brother’s wife. Twice. What a gentle way to say that: scoundrel. To describe a man who cuckholded his own brother, a man so careless or self-indulgent or so struck by IDGAF that he didn’t even start pulling out? Not even after the first pregnancy? This was back in the 1920s, of course, before DNA and all that. The scoundrel’s brother just figured it out by counting.

3

My sons fight over Pokemon Go on my phone in the McDonald’s drive-thru. Cop lights blitz across the street. Have you ever known someone who killed someone? L asks. My cousin killed a man in 2018, though I keep this to myself. Our fries are in the deep fryer, or being salted. The line is slow going, and the boys keep on fighting. I came across a photo of me, this cousin, and my grandmother at a Medieval Times jousting, adorned with paper crowns and holding turkey legs in 1998. The New York Post reported my cousin did this because the neighbor wouldn’t turn down the bass and he was easily disturbed by noise. I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that man is now dead. My cousin’s middle name is my grandfather’s name, which is also my son’s name, the one who is now holding an iPhone just out of reach from his brothers in the third row and screaming, emphatically, No! I! Didn’t! My grandmothers’ last email to my cousin in prison, recounting the Shackelford line, ends: Sadly, Lucy Delia passed on due to cancer in her early fifties. She never married. In another email I’ll tell you more about the lives of the other five cousins.