Adrian Gibbons Koesters holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is currently a Ph.D. student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Koesters says: "Both these poems were written while training to walk a half-marathon in the summer of 2008. Nearly every walk of that training produced some interesting animal apparition, and it was good to have the company."

Read her other poem:

Turtle

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Table of Contents

Nine Horses

by Adrian Gibbons Koesters

A curved roan phalanx,

thin electric wire,

patched ground, ground ivy,

thistles, the ditch, the flooding—

inimical to division, an arc

of nickering, rubbing necks,

a sentry, a lust to hear

grass and water spilling

down eight throats.

On the return there will be

a golf course, a barn,

two brown doves, two warblers

brassy and yellow. Someone

will ride one or two of the

horses unseen, someone will

have that. The cylindrical

presser will see to the lawn.

False water will run shy of it.

The passerby whistles, cracks

a stick on the roadway, as if

the nine could stand to be ruined.