Hallelujah Foal

I scoff, pooh-pooh at the legions
of camera-roll pictures of your children.

Willy-nilly they’ve run amok—
chomping sand,
chomping the bit,
sculpting crenellated towers
(with baby teeth missing)

to say: my God,
this is my mother.

Look at her.

I have driven myself too,
a motherless horse
straining at the bit.

I have stood on the windlass pond
asking for a cracked moon
axed through the ice
for a sip.

Never have I lolled, rolling,
fat stomach stove-piping to the sun.
My largesse has eaten hay—
the hay of orphaned foals,

hands flat (do not take my fingers).

I tell them:
Do not reach too high
above your most mid button.

You will know when your
palms forage at the bottom
of a drainpipe, hooves scrounging
for a wild-colt child 
singing

Hallelujah—

this is my mother.

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Kristen Reece works in the Canadian oilfield. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Puerto del Sol, BULL, ANMLY, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Kristen has managed, beyond all odds, to keep one plant alive and hopes to stay off the road long enough to get a cat.