Centaurides
Updated: 5h
after Fanny Howe
Kerry Neville
I won’t be able to write from the grave so let me tell you what I love—
My face pressed to my horse’s sweaty neck, his sharp musk: green grass, sweet dust, memory’s wave--canter trot walk halt—how he breathes in and out, an enormous bellow between my legs, who am I astride my horse but alive, Hylonome, a centaurides (also an asteroid orbiting Neptune and Uranus):
how my muscles feel spent, well-used after riding, horse or man—trembly thighs, my own sweaty neck, how my brain, my thinking, quiets, is, in fact, lying in a meadow deep in clover and milkweed blooming its crown around my spongy thoughts now buzzed by fat bees and dragonflies, warmed under the throbbing sun, so no thoughts at all, just I am I am I am:
a cup of tea in the afternoon, Barry's, steeped for ten minutes in a pot covered by a crocheted cozy, with a generous splash of milk, hard cube of sugar, stirred with a tiny spoon, and four ginger biscuits on a plate, and rain pattering the window, and the gray green world beyond a smeary quiet dream:
my dog asleep belly up on my bed, back legs splayed open, front paws in the air, his neutered bits on full view as if no danger exists, no predators, no kick in the ribs, everything trustworthy, everything reliable, and as if he was born in my king-size bed on my eiderdown duvet, rather than on a concrete floor of a rescue kennel to a mean, mangy bitch found in a ditch, scabbed over and covered with fleas, see? His paws paddling the air, some dream of swimming in a lake, chasing a stick, a duck, a fish:
my son who video calls late at night while walking New Hampshire winter, beanie pulled low over his forehead, scarf wrapped up his neck to his chin, only his eyes visible against the dark night, how sometimes he flashes bright under a street lamp, snow falling behind him, and how he is chatty, full immersion in his twenty-year-old university life, and in love, in a band, speaking of Greek Rembetiko music and a research essay, and yet also still five, curled beside me in bed chatting about snowmen, the constellations, the way the world seems so scary and big:
my daughter and her magenta and purple hair, the fierce glint in her eyes—knowing, steely, determined in her love, her faraway life which now includes a job, a girlfriend, a wolf spider that just gave birth to one hundred babies and how she sends a video of the tiny babies crawling around the cage, and also a video of her Chinese praying mantis sitting on her hand as if a bejeweled ring, and behind her on her bookshelf, I see the fox skull she found in the woods and bleached and polished , my wonder witch:
and words, I love words—why this life of words? Story-making? Taking from the world, from what is beyond me, not me, and, as if I am gravity's center, reeling it all inside, swallowing the horse, the clover, the bees, his sweat, my sweat, my dog’s velvet fur, the snow gathering on my son's eyelashes, my daughter’s baby spiders, Yes! I'm not afraid to swallow what stings because my appetite for the bitter and sweet is the same, and hunger for words, yes, how we call what is beyond us into our bodies, our bones, our blood moving through us, our own bellows—in and out and in and out—words carried into our hearts:
and you?
Two Horses in a Meadow near a Gate - 1649 - Rijksmuseum, Netherlands - Public Domain.
Kerry Neville is the author of the memoir Momma May Be Mad, winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir in 2026, praised in a starred Kirkus review, and featured on NPR's All Things Considered and RTÉ's Sunday Miscellany, and two collections of stories, Necessary Lies and Remember to Forget Me. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Brevity, The Washington Post, The Irish Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction and nonfiction have been named Notables in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She was a Fulbright Fellow at University of Limerick in Ireland, where she was visiting faculty in the M.A. Creative Writing Program. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia College and State University.