Eating the Horse

A poem in the Yale Review

Przewalski's horses at a sanctuary in Austria, on the Hungarian border.

Eating the Horse

Mark Wunderlich

I was served the horse steak, and it came
on a sizzling stone. I wore a bib
to keep the fat from spoiling my shirt.

The steak was the size of my hand
and it bubbled as the tissues were cooked,
and juices ran and steamed up on the stone


as the meat began to retract. The blood
cooked out of it, as did the paddock
where the horse had lived, which no one cleaned—

that and the cold meadow he was born in.
Last winter was seared from the meat,
as was the timothy hay, which was moldy,

as August had been damp and the barn roof
had leaked. The horse’s dam was still alive then,
though her teeth were bad and she slobbered

when she chewed. I bit down on what remained
of his indifferent owner, the pinworms
and botflies abundant that June, the clover

he preferred and the little sour apples
that fell from the neighbor’s unpruned tree.
I ate that last trailer ride to the auction,

where the horse’s shambling gait had marked him
for his future on my plate. I ate his entire past—
all of it. I ate his sturdy, unloved back.


I was thrilled to have this poem in The Yale Review last week, and which I thought I would give a second life by linking it here.  If you would like to hear a reading of it you can follow this link which will take you to The Yale Review site.  There's a short description there about how the poem came to be.  

My very first poetry publication was in The Yale Review, back in the early 1990's when J. D. McClatchy was the editor.  I was still in graduate school at Columbia University, and McClatchy was my teacher then in a workshop and in a prosody course. (He created one assignment by scooping up the takeout menus from the lobby of his apartment building, and distributed them to us in class, and we had to render selections in iambic hexameter).  At the end of the semester, he asked to see poems for the magazine, and he ended up taking two.  I was beyond thrilled by this, and I think I even got a small check for them, which was the first time anyone had paid me for something I had written.  Finding myself back in this journal meant a lot to me, and I'm grateful to the editors there.