You post a photograph of a white horse crossing your park path on a Sunday morning, as if nature itself gave birth to the beast who will never bite. His ears both pricked and pointed, like the elves who would have rode him, if this had been a dream. Your photograph turns teleportation device, takes me from soft seat in side garden of midway where kids kick footballs around small fields they do not yet have the imagination to leave and all the while traffic tears away the tracks of hooves that once echoed along this country lane, now just a curse on the commute from cramped city to concreted coast.
In Helsinki we sinned once, under the enchantment of a white whiskey or a malted gin, at a thin table with cast-iron chairs in a stone basement where low lighting softened both our discomfort and the flavour of the horse we devoured while thinking it was a bear. Earlier, I’d told you I’d slay dragons for you while on an island where the wind roared with more rights than we did, barely balancing like bad acrobats on the cliffed coast of chaos we had yet to crash onto. You didn’t seem to understand what I meant or think it interesting enough to listen to and I wanted to slay the sentiment in half, there, on that land where a castle lay cursed in the clay and tourists came to contemplate what it took to survive once, upon a time of pirates and plagues and riches and religions and soldiers celebrated as heroes for saying they’d slay dragons daily for folk they didn’t even claim to love.
Teleportation trips through time and I catch myself at the starting point of a serious Sunday by a sea whose weighty cliffs clamour louder than before, as if in reaction to my arrival on horseback to free the parts of me the rocks left bruised since birth. The Dragon Slayer of Doolin I announce to a sleeping stream as we cantor along famine walls that have been worn down towards the shore.
As if perceiving thought, this fair horse, with highlights of all beginnings and endings threaded through his mane, brings me closer to this famine wall so I can run my broken skin over its shamed structure that still sighs with the held hope of each individual stone that wanted to be something more than a filler that was made fit into a form. Suddenly, I recall my own small beginnings and being pushed into an even smaller space, a box that someone older, supposedly wiser, had carved my name and identity into, long before I had even learned to crawl.
A little bird sits next to me on this white beast that doesn’t bite. Black bird with specs of white, of light, lighter. It can all be lighter. Fragility can be a force. A single magpie can spark joy, a horse can have wings. We write our own fairytale in the end, whether stuck in the wall, or on an island, or in a castle, or in the kitchen, or under a cliff or in the air. I came to a coast, once, cast in the armour I’d been buried under, to enable the salt to rust me into a freedom.
You post a photo of a white horse crossing your park path and fact and fairytale entwine.
DAMIEN DONNELLY (he/him) returned to Ireland in 2019 after 23 years in Paris, London and Amsterdam, working in the fashion industry. His writing focuses on identity, sexuality and fragility. His daily interests revolve around falling over and learning how to get back up while baking cakes. His short stories have been featured in Second Chance from Original Writing, Body Horror from Gehenna & Hinnom, A Page from My Life from Harper Collins & poetry in Eyewear, The Runt Magazine, Black Bough, Coffin Bell, Barren Magazine & Fahmidan Journal. His debut poetry collection Eat the Storms was published by The Hedgehog Press. He hosts the weekly poetry podcast Eat The Storms. You can find him on Twitter @deuxiemepeau, Insta @damiboy, or on his website deuxiemepeaupoetry.com.