The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Ghost Moose by Margo Taft Stever

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Ghost Moose by Margo Taft Stever, released by Kattywompus Press in 2019.

End of Horses

I write to you from the end

of the time zone. You must realize

that nothing survived after

the horses were slaughtered.

We sleep below the hollow

burned-out stars.

We look beyond dust bowls

searching for horses.

When you walk in the country,

you will be shocked to meet

substantial masses on the road.

We do not know who to accuse

or where the horses were driven,

who slaughtered them, or for what

purpose. Had the horses slept

under the linden trees? The generals

and engineers pucker

and snore on the veranda.

In 2019, Margo Taft Stever’s second full-length collection of poetry, Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press), a 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, and her chapbook, Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press), both appeared. In 2022, her third full-length collection, THE END OF HORSES, will be forthcoming from Broadstone Press. Her four other poetry collections include The Lunatic Ball; The Hudson Line, 2012; Frozen Spring; and Reading the Night Sky. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plume, upstreet, Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day Blackbird, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, Webster Review, and West Branch. She is the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. In 2021, as Adjunct Assistant Professor, she taught Poetry and Bioethics in the Bioethics Department of the Medical School at Case Western Reserve University. She also teaches poetry at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children.