Horses By Skeets, Jake

The landscape of the Navajo Nation is undergoing dramatic changes. In 2018, 191 wild horses were discovered dead in a stock pond near Gray Mountain. The horses were trapped thigh- and neck-deep in mud, some piled on top of others. Horses is a twelve-part poem responding to the climate crisis faced by this region and beyond. ''This is the story we tell when seasons change / but what are told of time: time is an ulcer / a lie we tell through mouths not our own / because this mouth belongs to policy/ because time is stolen from us.'' Horses is about the end of the world, but it might also be about emergence, caught somewhere at the horizon, like the morning, all blue and crisp.