Plastic Horses

Your room is a forest, roots
clutching dirt the way our mom must have clutched

the table cloth when you took her car. I was combing
plastic horses and thinking how, like a horse,

or some gypsy women, you never stopped
moving. That night you called

from a pay phone in a city
that still had pay phones. I imagined you shivering

in our dad's army jacket. There was rain
of course, an orange streetlight thumping

in your mouth when you told me to get out
after high school, a white hallway

that in 1998 only existed on TV. A leaf unfurled
in my throat, and I knew I wouldn't see you

until the seed you planted shot out
my ears, a tree with leaves red

as tongues. Our mom hooked
the phone, and I lost you to a field

of plastic horses, cold
but for manes of your chopped hair.