Owen Taylor
Bio
Stories (19/0)
Sailing Horses
Dreamed of horses last night, wonderful strong, running. Off through magnificent green rolling hills, down into deep coolies, and back, racing past me, colored ones, deep reds, dappled ones, black ones with snow caps on their bottoms. I let them sweep by. I'd "be a gate" as my grandad would tell me. The spotted ones would run right up close, the white in their brown eyes shining, they'd snort at me, glide by, I could feel the hooves rumble the earth, smell the dirt tilled by a hundred striped hooves. The tall green grasses sweeping into hilltop waves, a green sea, a prairie ocean. I breathed the breeze, salty saddle blanket air, watching each above midline, strong chests, muscled sinew, heads and necks, strong backs, sail through the green sea like a small flotilla of fast ships, the gang would race together each with its personal flag of identity spotted backs or fronts, short and long tails mixing the froth of the grassy ocean in its wake, marking each boats course. Chasing each other in a prairie regatta, outward bound, side by side through the green waves, turn past the far away hilltop trees, then down into the swell together, following, following, and then up, over the crests break to sail past me again. I imagined them not using the wind but making it. Arms stretched, hands and fingers feeling the seeds of the green waves, swaying to and fro washing my palms, the swell coming, grassy waves parting in the wake of each creature hurtling past.
By Owen Taylor3 years ago in Poets
All Bull
They were prime seats, fifteen rows up, right above the beer garden. It was a hard wood territory that housed, at any one time, my family. Dad, mom, uncle, various, girl or boy cousins, my younger brother and me. We garnered these splinter infested seats above the beer garden, for one, because my old man fed the stock, and when he didn't my brother and I would drive our old beat-up ford through the swamp sized mud puddles to haul hay to the big bull pen in the back. The second, our family had been part of the community for a hundred years. We were sandwiched on the right by Ben and Elise Schumacher, their rowdy twenty something boys, on the left Case Lemon, with wife Shelby and their two crazy cute twin girls. The seats not always in the shade were on the top row, each bench made of two, two by twelve scabby wooden planks, with a crack between where you would drop your sun seed shells, a single rail about shoulder blade high was all that kept any of us from caving in the roof below. None of us really had to worry about losing the splinter infested seats, having received them hand me down, great grandad, to grandad, to sons by manifest destiny, or as my old man would explain in an off kilter Irish brogue,
By Owen Taylor3 years ago in Fiction
Owl
Being a white kid on the reservation had some advantages. Especially if you were little when no color mattered. All your friends had at least six grandmas, most of who were actually great aunties, of course what each of them had, was a big heart, and a quick tongue. I would spend a night or two every summer, (when my folks would go out for Friday and Saturday’s), at this or that hot July pow wow, sitting with my friend and his cousin, eating fry bread and drinking Cool-Ade, listening to the drums and the bells on the dancer’s costumes on the tail gate of his uncles old seventy chevy pickup. For bedtime we would toss every extra blanket we could find in the back of that pickup, kick off our cowboy boots, lay back in our socks and stare up at the blinking stars, our denim coats as pillows. Grandma Sally would go from truck to truck, car to car, to check on all the little ones. She wasn’t any one’s grandma, she was every one’s grandma. She seemed especially fond of our little gang, she would jump up swing her little body around and plunk down on the tail gate, then shimmy in, lean against a wheel well pull a blanket up, she would point up and tell us this story.
By Owen Taylor3 years ago in Fiction
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