Picture me pure centaur, sure astride

my chestnut steed, the both of us wild maned

and pacing with untamed grace, synchronised limbs

most undeniably stallioned among the ungulates.

In the city I can swing this vision – hot to trot

with my stolen horse girl valour. It’s true enough

I rode him, true he carried me, true we flew in tandem

through fields and river fords, two hearts stomping

in our chests like hooves in wet turf. But there is

no couple’s therapy that can solve the severance

of the sacred bond between a girl and her gelding.
  *

As is proper, the boys of the school were possessed

by a fascinated horror of the horse girls. How openly

they theorised on the coupling of the canter,

palomino musculature flexing between thighs. Clearly

they envied the means to achieve our need for speed

that would mash their aching testes to mincemeat

in one galloping contusion. And the pony club’s

dainty dressages only proved that the girlies owned ferality

as a concept. Grooming brushes incited hayfever redeye

and unbridled rivalries. We raced each other under

the lowest hanging branches at the showgrounds’ perimeter

to see who’d topple, winded, in a flurry of sycamore helicopters.

My horse once kicked a kid heartily across the arena

but still I stood behind him to braid ribbons in his red tail, believing

if I caught that crescent bruise, I’d have earned every blot of it.
  *

It doesn’t end with the equestrians.

Since highschool I have formulated

extensive psychosexual theories of sports…

the queercoding of netball, repressed passion

of the supposedly contactless encounter

thrumming with impermissible violence.

Sharpen your harpy nails, mark your opponent

and hover closer than her own shadow

or throw down your bib like a goal attack gauntlet

shrieking this was supposed to be a social game!!!!!

Though I’m no real referee of the court, preferring to play the field –

I was a hockey jock, hefting my composite wood,

idly swanging my stick like a slazenger strapon

in my strategically asthmatic defence position.

Phallic appropriation girlies rise up! But all the games

never came so close to another body as when riding. Closer

to another killer body. To a killable body,

reined in full harness, the original pony play

always two animals that could murder each other

but are choosing – for now – to trot about together looking sillay.
*

On a riding camp we sat in our saddles and watched

an older girl demonstrate the triple bar jumps. We sat

as the two ascended like one whole holy dove, we sat

as they stayed aloft – suspended like a flesh rainbow casting

an arc of bone and sinew in the grey sky – we sat

as the first hoof to touch again on mortal earth slipped

and we sat as the rest of the body crumpled over it,

saw the horse faceplant in the wet grass

and the body fall the other way, his neck a furred horseshoe

collapsing, his girl steadfastly in the saddle until our supervising adult

dismounted and coaxed her out of it, stepping over

the horse’s legs spasming. The magpies swooped in from the pines.

And when the vet finally came with his needle of ketamine dream

to put down the paralysed horse, girl sobbing as she stroked the long face laid in

her lap, we sat on our own horses as they did not watch at all,

but continued to graze.
  *

I talk a big game as a retired horse girl

but the big guy and I did not maintain a high trust relationship.

Cold metal caught us both, twisted past forgivable tenderness:

the bit forced sore between his lips; stirrups that caught

my feet to be dragged by, screaming, thrown again

on the mercy of the paddock. Sure I kicked his sides,

as surely as he sank his teeth into my thigh,

or nipped my fingers instead of the clover offered in my palm.

But it was love! Or that which an activated nervous system

transmutes to some similar devotion. I having not yet learned

any smirking meaning for bareback, he a lifelong gelding –

we were two animals rampant with urges we could not contemplate

except as the itch to disobey. And when we both felt it we moved as one,

his red mane licking like flames down his neck, one ear pointing forward

and the other turned back to hear me, something like freedom resounding

through us as loud as horseshoes beating down the stable doors

to run and run, further and faster than the last rays of the lucky sun.