Caged
Women on Horseback
Finally, they arrive— Women on horseback. You can stop wondering why or asking, where is the calvary.
They seek and are determined to find Things such as steel oil drums in a field A barrel-shaped vessel used to conceal whatever men wished burned in darkness.
It isn’t real, this landscape. Much like a painting or a façade It stretches blandly, wheat of golden rods that blind the eye.
These pillars are the searchers, though; They cannot be denied. They ride and hump— Rebels sublime—they buck, and on-trend with the times they glide
Until the clock changes its face And dusk settles across pasture and grime; Until every last iris bleeds inside while vision funnels and cones into fate.
While hourglass figures pitch forth and fight With signs and a lantern, ignoring exhaust; The absent and buried are dragged toward the light to save every loss from being for naught.
Gillian Thomas is a Washington DC-area writer and poet. A graduate of New York City’s Hunter College, Thomas received her bachelor’s degree in English and theater before first being published in the journal The Iconoclast. She currently writes from home, alongside her 10-year-old son, math professor husband, and a barking Miniature Schnauzer. Thomas’ work has also been featured in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle issue #73, Ligeia Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Topical, Spry, JMWW journal, Grand Little Things, and more.