Kate Petersen
Horses Under the Bridge
Horses under the bridge, my father would say to me. Knowing it wasn’t what people said. He meant, let it go. He meant forget about it. Where it equals one of four hundred things I refuse to forget.
Kate Petersen
What are 2 - 3 books (regardless of genre) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch. Whereas by Layli Long Soldier. Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli. Chemistry by Weike Wang. Basin and Range by John McPhee. Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing by Marianne Boruch.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your “local” community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
The clerk at the NAU campus post office is about as kind as anyone gets, and improves our community of stubborn letter-senders and needers of stamps, as well as the farther-flung web of letter-getters out there. One day I asked her for a 'boring' stamp to mail a utility bill with, but I ended up liking the boring one she offered so much that I bought a sheet of them. She showed me the other books she had: Dragons; scratch and sniff popsicles. "My whole stamp drawer smells like watermelon," she confessed, "but I try to pick the fun ones." Also, the place is super-decked out for Halloween, and I have a real soft spot for some under-stretched fake spider web. I suspect that's her doing, too.
I also admire and am deeply glad for the work of all those who drafted and commented on Flagstaff's Climate Action Plan, which seeks to reduce our city's greenhouse emissions 80 percent by 2050, and seeks adaptive measures that prioritize those most vulnerable to climate change. In light of the alarming IPCC report on 1.5C global warming, such bold and thoughtful local efforts are absolutely imperative.
What part of a kid’s movie completely scared you when you were young?
Fantasia was pretty terrifying, I dimly recall. Also, the fateful horse-dive in Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, making me the first person ever to admit in print to seeing that movie.
Kate Petersen Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University, she currently serves as coordinator for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.
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Kate Petersen
Horses Under the Bridge
Horses under the bridge, my father would say to me. Knowing it wasn’t what people said. He meant, let it go. He meant forget about it. Where it equals one of four hundred things I refuse to forget. He meant, I think, be happy, free as those idiomed horses galloping under their idiot bridge, hooves clapping and ringing in the trestles after like dropped nails.
Okay, I would say to him. Because that was, for both of us, the wish: to be okay. Which is usually done with the parent being the bridge—a shelter to be left eagerly, standing in its own staunch abandonment to watch the vanishing point, the beloved speck.
So I let him be the bridge (though I’ve got more experience being left), which made me the horse—or horses, I guess—a tight herd of them rivering under, wild and away, leaving farewells behind in hoof prints and kerchiefs of dust. Making gone look as graceful as anywhere else. And anyway, I like horses.
Get on, go, and too far now to take it back. Tell him I'm not the horses but all the unnamed things. The dumb girl who didn’t latch the door, for one. A tine of grass in the field, trampled and bent low enough to feel forgiven. Some days I'm the long-gone water, and some days I'm the barn, my heart hanging from its top hinge, swinging open and back, slacked with the memory of having been full once, and sweet with noise.