five things i like about brandi wells' poisonhorse

1. The narrator gently poisons a companion horse. It doesn't mind all that much. In fact it sort of craves it. And long walks in the forest. Which is frighteningly, awesomely perfect.

2. Reading is for people who like to make the images move themselves. Wells' weirdly-sad-because-you've-lived-this? dreamscape of anthropomorphic anti-Neoplatanism shouts images of violent tenderness that demand Buddha-like absorption and tree-scaling adaptation. As in, "depth." As in, burrowing into the bowels of a lady who lives at the bottom of a cistern might require some special skills. As in caring about something might require eating it. As in, duh.

3. We've all felt like a severed head trapped in a bear's belly trying (with great difficulty) to make an important point to another severed head trapped in the gastrointestinal tract of a different bear who's lumbering around the same backyard. We just didn't know it 'til now.

4. The cruel and continuous torture and subjugation of rats (especially some nifty little harnesses that "squeeze their bodies too tightly, puncturing fur and skin, digging into muscles, yielding only to bone."). Yeah, I know the book's a fable and the rats in it are sort of unfortunate and defenseless pawns relegated to the wreckage of the narrator and poisonhorse's chaotic relationship but last night an actual rat with a tail as thick as a middle finger ran giddily across my shoe as I walked out of my building and I fucking hate them.

5. This:

"If my poisonhorse is a child, we are all children. If we are all children, we are horses. If we are truly horses, we must be made of poison. If our insides are acidic, rotting lumps pressed together and expanding, then we will never have the capacity to love. We are created without the necessary hollows inside and if there are accidentally hollows in us, we fill them with other things before love can take root, swell, inflate, inhabit, control. Because we are aware that love must be crushed. Eradicated."

http://mudlusciouspress.com/nephew/

Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells
a nephew of Mud Luscious Press
August 2012
34 pages