When the Horses

By Mary Helen Callier

In her award-winning debut, When the Horses, Mary Helen Callier explores the rich inner terrain of an imaginative childhood through deep and curious poems set against the uncanny beauty of the American South.

As Walter Benjamin wrote: "Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater," and it is in this bedraggled theater of memory that Callier stages her poems. A careful, curtained-off darkness lurks at their edges, actors appearing more in silhouette, evoking, often, the shape of a thing, the sound it makes, instead of the thing itself. 

Like all memories, these moments are fleeting. To read When the Horses is to see something nearly vanished, like trying to remember a dream hours after waking—a dream that haunts a wounded part of you, though you can't remember which. These are poems of encounter—with place, self, other—and the uncanny beauty that remains after loss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Apr 15, 2025
• ISBN: 9781949944433

Book preview

I

TO HAVE CAUSED THE QUAKE, TO HAVE TORN IT OPEN

We walked to where we thought it might be best

to see the water. Surely there was still some

secret in the world.

We walked to where I found what I found buried

in the dirt, beneath a patch of reeds:

the rounded head of what must have once lived

tucked inside the earth. And, like those fish

that live in caves, I saw it had no holes for eyes,

because of course it didn’t need them.

Surely, it had been a thing that lived

by touch alone. And because it was small

I took it. Because it fit inside my pocket

I carried it, feeling, as we walked in the dark

the knobs where the eyes would’ve been,

feeling, as we made our way around the rim.

And so I took what I found and set it on a ledge

where every day I knew the sun would bleach it.

And every day I went to see

what the light had done. I can’t say for sure

just what it was: a skull, a hole, a rounded pearl, a tiny orb

inside of which small winds had once been turning.

But every night I could feel it

moving farther from the earth.

II

TONIGHT I THINK MY BODY IS A LAKE

When you were young you swallowed a handful

of pills and walked outside to see

about the banquet. You didn’t think there’d ever be

a way to live inside the world.

You fell. You heard a distant voice approaching,

as if from the opposite end of a tunnel.

They found you, pale and wet

as a newborn rat.

They slid their hands into your mouth,

a horseless bit.

You said nothing. The cord that tied you

to that place was quickly cut.

What clean hands you’d had.

What long hair.

When you woke you woke alone.

The stars came back and stayed there.

You stood up and left your body,

a starfish releasing a soluble limb.

There was the smell of gasoline, the heavy

sound of gravel. Somewhere in the distance you could hear

an engine choke. Everything was slick and damp

with dew, with the quiet glow a field possesses

moments before being burned.

WHAT SHE TOLD ME

The strangest moments matter. Two lovers swim

through the thick murk of sleep and surface

with their foreheads pressed together—

warm, like how a stone is warm when the