Enjoy it while you've got it, my father says
from the driver’s seat of his Jeep Cherokee. 

It’s late in the day. Outside the window, 
the mares with their lips pull up stones

weighing down the paddock, longing shadows 
harnessed to the carriages of their bodies. 

I’m thirteen. On the stereo, Sting drones on 
about a jealous sky. Earlier, my coach 

told me a story about a girl who ate cigarette butts
to be skinnier. It was really a story about how 

I’m skinny enough, and worthy of showing 
the slender, sport horse Friesian—my weight 

advantageous to the performance, a bonus.
Near the stable, outside the caretaker’s house, 

a man named Chester the Molester grows roses
the size of mare hearts. The mares we control 

with the casted, brassy buds of our spurs, 
steering them in tight circles as if we’re

the animal engine of a singular machine, 
but the machine is imaginary. Dust fills the air 

like smoke in a stomach. The crop wins. Coach says,
Make a heart with your shoulder blades

but all that happens is the circle gets smaller. I quit
before I ever deal much with Chester. The other girls

told me his name. When they got too big, 
heavy-headed, and fat with color, he’d prune them. 

Enjoy it while you’ve got it, my father says.