What Night Knows After Gauguin’s Le Cheval Blanc

by Lauren K. Alleyne

Some women ride horses.

Some women are horses.

Some horses are wolves

Who have lost their teeth,

And are ridden by women.

Some wolves are horses

Ridden wild with dreams.

Some women are dreams

In the shape of horses

Free of the ghost of wolves.

Some ghosts are women,

Their bent air a kind of riding.

Some women ride dreams

And bend the air, freeing

The ghosts and the wolves

And the horses.

“What Night Knows” is included in Honeyfish, a collection of Lauren K. Alleyne’s poems publsihed by New Issues in April 2019. The book received the 2018 Green Rose Prize. More information about the collection can be found at: https:// laurenkalleyne.com/books/ honeyfish/

Lauren K. Alleyne hails from the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthol- ogies, including The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, Crab Orchard Review, among many others. She is author of Dif- ficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues (US) & Peepal Tree (UK), 2019).

This poem has been re-printed with the permission of the author.