Washington, D.C.
Not long after the start of the war,
one December night, fire
broke, an army corral
not far from the Potomac
whose dank, melancholic smell
of drowned and Union dead
rose from a marshy bank.
Tethered by their halters, packed
close, un-grieving, untended,
horses whinnied and reared.
Two hundred blooded mares
died there; pricked by sparks,
many more, cantered
to town and sleeping cold.
In another fire, Manhattan,
girls leap from the high-storied
windows of a factory.
Manic, blackened fillies,
coats studded with embers,
lay on their flanks in the street.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 21, Issue 3.
Zara Raab’s books are Fracas & Asylum, Swimming the Eel, Rumpelstiltskin, or What’s in a Name? and The Book of Gretel. Her work, including book reviews as well as poems, appears in The Hudson Review, Mezzo Cammin, Verse Daily, Arts & Letters, Stand (UK), Poet Lore, and The Dark Horse. She lives north of Boston.
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