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Sheryl Luna’s poems are brimming with sincerity—and they seem to elucidate the actual while reveling in the cosmic. Her work offers a palpable humanity, stemming in part from her multi-cultural heritage that she simultaneously strives to reconcile and illuminate. Having known Sheryl over the years, I remain impressed by her unwavering self-examination and emotional tenacity.
Widely accomplished as a poet, critic, and teacher, her credentials are also noteworthy: Sheryl Luna won the inaugural Andres Montoya Poetry Prize for emerging Latino/a poets, and her first collection Pity the Drowned Horses was published by University of Notre Dame Press. She has received fellowships at Ragdale, Yaddo and the Anderson Center. She also received the 2008 Alfredo del Moral Foundation award, funded by Sandra Cisneros. Poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Amherst Review and others. She is also a Canto Mundo fellow. She blogs at Dialectical Migrations and writes a review column for the El Paso Times.
It is certainly a pleasure to have Sheryl’s work here on Numéro Cinq.
—Martin Balgach
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Four Poems
By Sheryl Luna
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Equus
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If you try to ruin me,
saddle me with man-made
doubt, I’ll gallop past large pines.
Aspen will bleed fall as I run
forgotten trails, seeking
a sunlit path.
My sway back will sweat slick.
Arctic and blazing,
I’ll grow wild,
rear up and kick.
If you try to break me,
remember, I’m a maverick
on a mad run.
Corral me?
Herd me?
A lasso burns my thick neck.
I thump, trot, and kick.
Use me like property?
Cage me and blame me?
I’m hard-hoofed, snickered trouble.
Just when you think you’ve won,
I’ll buck.
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