Some Drew Horses, and: Dash, and: The Family Angela Sorby (bio) Some Drew Horses The two Kellys whocould draw horsesin third gradeunderstood balance.Their horses canteredacross construction paper.The Kellys loosedtheir small motorskills, and musclesrippled through their pencils.Their ponytails,shining in scrunchies,said Look At Me.No saddle, no rider.When we were older I'd envythe Kellys their beauty,and later still search Facebookto confirm they got fatin their forties,but when they were horsesI was their sky, their poppies,their prairie. On and onthey ran through me,with such authorityit was hard to believe—no, I still don't believe—we were children. [End Page 95] Dash My worst college job was typing triplicate insurance claims so badly I kept starting over, feeding sheets into an Underwood typewriter as neurotoxins rose from the Liquid Paper jar, obliterating most of the late eighties, plus I drank after work, so don't blame me, PJ, if I've forgotten how to fall in love—where to go, what to eat, who pays. After years of teaching I talk like I know what I'm saying, but, per npr's Shankar Vedantam, vertebrates—fish, birds, people—act with our primeval brainstems first. Only later do we dredge up words like love, whatever that means. Last night a raptor landed on my shoulder in a dream. Way way back in the twentieth century, Freudians would mansplain: you're ambivalent, you're afraid, but gone are the days of the wellangela [End Page 96] padded psychoanalytic interior. What's left? The spine holds what the mind drops: nodes, not sentences. Go above your nerve, wrote Dickinson, Queen of the Overthinkers, but when she fell for Judge Otis Lord, it hit her— the dash, the ecstatic erasure. The Family Before our divorce my exdealt books, so one yearour basement was suddenlyfull of a dead mob boss's library—torture manuals,philosophy, criminal law,opera librettos, and of course,Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Some volumes were heavilyannotated: How to Dominate Others,Stalin's Strategies. The boss,one Joey Balistrieri, spent his jail terms literallystudying how to be evil,marking key passages.If there's an evil gre, he passed— bribing cops, whacking rivals,but when I picture Joey in his cell,bent over Machiavelli's The Prince,his neck is smooth and vulnerable, [End Page 97] a swan's neck, as if evil misseda few nodes in back and relaxedinto—if not innocence,then curiosity. Now he's nowhere mail goes,but if I could send him a gentlebook (Charlotte's Web, maybe?)I'd inscribe the flyleaf Dear Uncle Joey,since whatever dnamakes us readersmakes us forever family. [End Page 98] Angela Sorby Angela Sorby is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program at Marquette University in Milwaukee. She's the author of three poetry books, Distance Learning (New Issues 1998), Bird Skin Coat (U of Wisconsin P 2009), and The Sleeve Waves (U of Wisconsin P 2014), plus a critical book, an anthology of children's poetry, and an edited collection on poetry and pedagogy. Her poetry has won a Midwest Book Award, the Brittingham Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Lorine Niedecker Prize, Discovery/The Nation, and other honors. Copyright © 2021 University of Nebraska Press