I came to film for the horse, for the image of the horse,
moving. I took a course in Super 8, that obsolete plastic
wonder shaped exactly like a gun. I had no talent.
I pointed the camera at windows in Paris
because windows are metaphors for nothing
if not seeing equinely. Muscularity,
I thought, later, when the intern who spoke no English
held me in a pedagogical embrace
in the windowless closet teaching me exactly
nothing about developing film that I remember
beyond enveloping my body in a hunger no stranger
than what my darkroom horseheart will wash into being
visible—nothing to stop the single galloping horse
becoming a multitude of galloping horses gunning
for the line, away from the shot that set them running.
—Lauren Delapenha
Lauren Delapenha (Website) is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart nomination. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Common, The Windhover, The Ekphrastic Review, The Cortland Review, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Connecticut near to some train tracks.