By Michael Derrick Hudson

At first it was sublime, all her medieval tapestry qualities,
her plangent, gracile profile against a field

of heraldic green, the silvery trill of her neighs. My life
has purpose now, so I told myself happily

shoveling fodder and greasing the tackle. An obligation
to myth and legend, so I told myself, 

is worth the hassle. So I showered and shaved every day, 
expelled vulgarity and embraced the necessity

for an orderly household. And yet she still craps the halls,

and crap is crap even when it shimmers like the rainbows
on an oil slick and smells an awful lot

like butterscotch candy. She’s moody! And an incurable
insomniac keeping me awake gobbling stardust and

moonbeams in the middle of the night, her dainty hooves
clip-clop-clip-clopping across the kitchen tiles. 

She leaves the refrigerator door open half the time, uses up
the ice cubes. Every day it’s something, poking

her narwhal horn through the porch screen or another divot
gouged out of the drywall. Come the weekend,

she inevitably lays her head in the laps of my lady visitors, 
pestering them to scratch her ears and 

pat her dazzling pure white withers while she knocks over
beer cans and ashtrays. Some Knight Errant

or another is always pounding on the front door demanding
proof of her existence, as if I’m the Fairytale Ogre

keeping her locked away. Ha! She hides the whole time
in her bedroom like a teenager, ear pressed

against the door. Everything I say mortifies her. She plays
the same sad Joni Mitchell song over and over

on her little portable record player and mopes at suppertime

and smudges eyeliner all over the vanity. And each morning
she reproaches me over waffles with her doleful 

little nickers, and I still have no idea how I got this so wrong.

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Michael Derrick Hudson lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Poetry, Boulevard, Columbia, Fugue, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals.
He was co-winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize.