2023 Frontier OPEN Winner: Autobiography of not a horse by MaKshya Tolbert
Join us in celebrating this poem by MaKshya Tolbert, winner of the 2023 Frontier OPEN!
We’re so delighted to award “Autobiography of not a horse” as the winner of our $5000 OPEN prize. Please stay tuned as we’re publishing the finalists throughout December.
Autobiography of not a horse
I admit I am human and am wondering
Who gets to write about horses who gets
to follow cowbirds following horses
Here’s my little autobiography of not a horse
Broken-winded I reread a story about horses
There were nicknames They hurt sometimes
He tried to brush the flies away he wanted to
be shadefull I wanted to be impressive
I was beginning to grow handsome In my account
of not being a horse She seemed to like me
He seemed to like me We get so impressive
I wanted to seem grown Sometimes I suffered
I’m sad to have said to myself It was not really
so bad I’m sad to have gotten so used to it
See those horses in a double harness I strangle
with worry too tell my sorrows to horses listening
Sometimes my account of myself is all
This is how I must live duress for blinkers
The wrong practices fit then the men
Sometimes I can feel my legs again
Here’s my little autobiography I was okay
being who I was I did not try to be a horse
But I tried doing what horses do I ran
with the letters I was swift I was grass
MaKshya Tolbert
MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) just found their way back to Virginia. MaKshya serves on the Charlottesville Tree Commission and is a 2022-23 Lead to Life Curatorial Fellow and New City Arts Spring Artist-in-Residence. Their recent poems and essays have been published in Interim Journal, Emergence Magazine, Queer Poem-a-Day, RHINO, and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. In their free time, they are elsewhere— where Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. calls, 'that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe.'
