Issue 93 – Unicorn Adventures

heavenly horses
purity made manifest
horns flash like lightning

By DJ Tyrer

Blood On The Horn
By Cardinal Cox

Tech billionaire (some
Simple thing we all use)
Couldn’t buy Cluny Tapestries
So pumped dollars into next best
Biologists and veterinarians
To start with new-born white goat
Tweaked the horn bud
Transplanted on to the forehead
Raised in a clean environment
When old enough – billionaire
Climbed into the paddock
Goats butt – it’s in their blood
Horns curved back like a car bumper
But the pampered adopted beast
Armed with a stiletto alcorn
Middle of an angry forehead
Embedded deep in wealthy flesh
Coroner – when signing certificate
Wrote down “Death by Myth Adventure”

white horses with horns
nigh impossible to lure
maiden passes test
hunters springing their ambush
red marring white purity

By Aeronwy Dafies

God’s Other Child
By Harris Coverley

“Horribly sick, without knowing.

She is vanishing, she is infected
With the delusions of man. She has become a delusion.

Every cell of her body is ruptured with human delusion.
She is vanishing

Into a hallucination.”

—Ted Hughes, The Black Rhino

I.

Follow back the way they came. Further back
            than as the Greeks knew them. The
            barbarian riders. Thracians. Those

In myth labelled as centaurs and crushed
            by the Lapiths. Further to the forebears of
            Turk and Mongol alike. In those

Lands they might just be found. Between
            the Kurgans and the Botai. And before

The Dzungarian Gate through which Herodotus
            said lived the race of men closest to the gods.
            The origins lie there for both. Horned and

Clear headed. Waiting to be tamed and ridden
            or worse.

II.

He came across and up from Shiraz. That city
            of poets. Across the lands of the new
            conquerors. The city-killers. Up to the crystal
            clear crater lake, like a mother to the sky out
Of which it had risen before any beast had walked
            or crawled.

He saw it there.
Horn tipped to the water. Reflecting back
A slender ivory cone. Dismounting

His own steed, he could feel the power
As he drew
            his sword.

           Two cuts.
            And it
            Was done.

III.

No others of its kind presented itself to him.
He was alone with his horse, which looked
            at its far distant sibling with curiosity
            and with sadness. He picked

Up the horn and felt as his horse did.

The sky grew dark
            as the sun stayed

Still.

IV.

           The corruption of
            A man’s anima
            Flies faster
            Comes quicker
            Than any equine

           In the Hyperborean
            Dust.