I was twelve. She was a palomino the color of orange blossom honey. But her temperament was far from sweet, more at the ornery end of the scale. “Spirited” would be a polite way of putting it. She spooked easily and would wheel around in her stall. I don’t remember what I was tasked to do, change her feed bucket, check her water, but I was in her stall when she lunged at me. She clamped down on my right arm just below my shoulder. She held on so tightly that her teeth broke skin though my jacket and sweater. The crescent shaped bruise on my triceps lasted for over a week. I never regained my trust around that mare.

childhood fury at the end of a longe line

Cherie Hunter Day

lives in New Hampshire. Her micro-prose and prose poems have appeared in 100 Word Story, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, and Unbroken. She is the author of six chapbooks and seven full-length books, two of which won Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards. Her latest collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023), features haibun and tanka prose. When not writing or making collages, she’s outside exploring the woods and avoiding ticks.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Cherie Hunter Day: eight prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 3, 15 May 2024)

⚡ Two Favorite Haibun (A Family Resemblance: Haibun & Prose Poetry), essay by Cherie Hunter Day in contemporary haibun today 19.3 (December 2023)

⚡ Color Collages and B&W Collages by Cherie Hunter Day in multiple issues of Heliosparrow Poetry Journal (February 2020 through December 2023)

⚡ Two dozen works by Cherie Hunter Day have appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly since the debut issue in January 2020; please see Index of Contributors for the links.