Bisquick's Dance Break — Split Lip Magazine

My baddie’s got sweat from the chin
groove to his throat latch, he’s got warmers
from his pastern to his gaskin.
He got a customized terry-cloth
headband on Etsy from a woman
who rescues showgirl ponies.
Bisquick’s exquisite dressage
is God given, his devotion to jazzercise
edges on obsession. He gets low,
gets low, from the stable to the walls,
with drips down his furried chestnut.
It’s more than a feeling, this freedom,
to be a ghost and still hell-bent
on busting a move. In the life before this,
he repaired boomboxes in a small
town outside Spokane. His little
glasses swallowed his little human face.
The smoke from the soldering gun
made his nostrils flare and his mouth drool.
Now, in this iteration, he’s bigger, blue,
an apostle to deepcut lost EPs
and the piaffe’s five, six, seven, eight.
A crooked horse cannot develop impulsion.
Bisquick’s got that pure walk,
that pure trot, that drop it
like it’s hot pure cantor.
He doesn’t get nervous dancing
in public anymore; he gives
a soft chew on the bit and breaks it down.
At night, once all spent from sweating
to the eighties, Bisquick showers
then gracefully tucks himself in. He imagines
being bigger, bluer, an elitist
equestrian’s fantasy. He’s the star
of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna
AND The Royal Academy of Ballet.
He dreams of being the one lifted,
airs above the ground,
a perfect courbette.
Horse girls, horse girls,
horse girls
screaming Bisquick
Bisquick everywhere.

C. Russell Price is from Glade Spring, Virginia, but lives in Chicago. They are a Lambda Fellow in Poetry, a Ragdale Fellow, a Windy City Times 30 Under 30 honoree, a two-time Top 50 Writers of Chicago honoree, an essayist, and a poet. They are the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other (Sibling Rivalry Press) and oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems (Northwestern University Press). Their current project is Bisquick: Seance Poems. They work with The Anarchist Review of Books, Story Studio Chicago, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Chicago Poetry Center.