LONGACRES

My mother says they used to race horses here.
She points to a field.
They called it Longacres.

Now it’s a track.
My favorite cousin is training for her first meet.
Young pale bodies run laps.

She tells me her father used to have horses,
as if this is news.

Their names were Foxy Lady & Night Train.
There’s an art to naming a racehorse, she says.
It must never have been used before;
it must never be used again.

She points to a mound.
That’s where she threw popcorn at the jockeys who lost.

She points to the bleachers.
That’s where her father drank too much
& pissed himself one Sunday afternoon.

There’s a pause.
We take in the late summer sun.
The last we’ll see of it for months.

My mother has a thought she doesn’t share & frowns.
She finds herself. She pats her knees & claps for the runners.
They used to race horses here, she says.
It was called Longacres.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions multiple times. His work has appeared in The Sycamore Review, The Vestal Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.