Poem of the Week: Lauren K. Alleyne

What Night Knows
After Gaugin’s Le Cheval Blanc

Some women ride horses.
Some women are horses.
Some horses are wolves
who have lost their teeth
and are ridden by women.
Some wolves are horses
ridden wild with dreams.
Some women are dreams
in the shape of horses
free of the ghost of wolves.
Some ghosts are women,
their bent air a kind of riding.
Some women ride dreams
and bend the air, freeing
the ghosts and the wolves,
and the horses.

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Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, whose work has been awarded prizes such as the 2010 Small Axe Literary prize, the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, an International Publication Prize from The Atlanta Review, and honorable mention in the 2009 Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2003 Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest. She has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, The Cimarron Review, Black Arts Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, The Belleview Literary Review, Growing Up Girl and Gathering Ground. She is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn, and her chapbook, Dawn In The Kaatskills, was published in 2008 by Longshore Press.