‘Horse School’, ‘Heart Study’& ‘The Secrets of Water and Air’

Sherri Harvey is an educator, freelance writer, photographer, and eco storyteller. She travels the world for projects that tell the stories of an environment in crisis and the people helping to save it, especially women. Over the past few years, she lived with a sociocracy struggling to find solutions for the water crisis in Spain, traveled to villages throughout West Africa learning about the plight of women in remote villages, worked with Orangutan Odysseys in Borneo to highlight the crisis of deforestation and orangutans, and followed a vet crew around the island of Phuket to create the documentary film, Accidental Advoctes in Phuket. The power of stories can unite cultures, share communion, and promote eco-change. Please see www.sherriharvey.com or @sherricoyote for more info.

Horse School

Joy trailed behind Faith
in elementary school. Older girls
taught them to canter and gallop and trot.
Fierce fillies in bell-bottoms and sneakers,
they pranced across the grass.
Other voices gave way
when their neighs saturated the air.
While they whinnied and nickered,
winter winds whipped
Faith’s hair like a mare’s rippling mane,
bared her slim ankles
with its trouser-tugging teeth.

The following spring
as Joy stood at their playground’s edge,
warming her back in the sun,
Faith arrived with a Boy Scout
ring on her lazy man finger.
“Billy asked me to go steady!” she squealed.
Joy snorted and pawed the ground.
Placing her hand on Joy’s arm,
Faith said with a sigh, “Oh, Joy,
we’re too old for horse school

now.” In the blurry recesses
of her mind, Joy still sees
the yellow yarn Faith wrapped
around the band to make that ring fit,
fiber fraying like the jute halters
horse trainers use
before moving on to the harder tack
of bridles and reins and bits.

Heart Study

Anxious to participate,
I enter the atrium—
all windows and light—
at the National Institutes of Health.
Pulse taken,
blood drawn,
echo- and electro-
cardiograms done,
I complete the stress test, then

proceed to an examination room.
A research nurse in maroon scrubs
slides a heart monitor from a six-inch packet,
places the device
in the space between my breasts,
points to the dime-sized silver circle
sitting like a doorbell button
at the center of my chest,
tells me, “Tap this disk to document

irregularities.” Back home,
I press that button
to record the arrhythmia I feel
each time my daughter leaves the house—
her wavy hair held back from her hopeful face
with a bright butterfly clip.
Beyond our threshold lies
a country where youthful dreams are
flatlined with guns and greed and grift.

The Secrets of Water and Air

Like a sleepwalker,
Delores Marah lumbers
along the trails of Shady Grove,
threads her way through tombstones,
stops at one
bearing her daughter’s name.
Mallory Dawn Marah,
engraved on a granite slab—a birthdate
followed by a dash.
Unrecovered, Mallory’s body
lies at the bottom of Lowe Lake
beyond the cemetery’s edge.

Phantoms fly from their graves.
Haunted whispers of remorse
swirl from inaudible tongues,
stir up summer leaves. Memories
of Mallory in a pink maillot
sprinting across the high dive
vault and spin and crash.
Dolores taught Mallory to tread water.
No one taught Mallory
to paddle fast enough to escape
the man who held her under water so long
she couldn’t swim away.

Never apprehended,
the man fled. The cops
closed the case, convinced
Mallory was just another runaway.
Mute swans snort and hiss.
Dolores trudges to the water’s rim.
She shields her eyes from the white
glare of the morning sun,
watches the swans lift off.
Faint voices buzz and hum,
carried away on the wings
of heavy bodies in flight.

Teresa Burns Murphy is the author of a novel, The Secret to Flying (TigerEye Publications). Her writing has been published in several places, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Evening Street Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Literary Mama, The Literary Nest, The Opiate, Southern Women’s Review, Sparks of Calliope, Stirring: A Literary Collection, and The Write City Review (Volume 4). Visit her at https://www.teresaburnsmurphy.com.