The Unicorn Is Attacked

By Heather Gluck

/ Second Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Poetry /      

I assumed the meaning of these things:

there was no blade against my horn

and in the early light their tunics behaved as skin.

I imagined that the yowl of their hunting horn

shook the berries from the bush and set the shy dogs

          to whimpering. That a sword cuts like a book opens:

to the exact middle. I bit off my tongue and it bounced

maroon against his leg. Behind him I saw the shadow

of a stag: it was a stone lain across the water.

My white flesh shone as silver. The dogs licked hard

at my glistening milk. I was wool in a woven graveyard

          and the men were forest.