Get Your Facts Straight by Hallie Moore

The Unicorn Tapestries- The Unicorn in Captivity, South Netherlandish, 1495-1505.

Get Your Facts Straight
                       
Not only this flimsy sun-gold fence
but a chunky, buckled collar
and a skimpy chain tethers you
to an improbable pomegranate.
 
This woven floral frenzy,
does it imprison or protect?
Hanging there as you do,
does it matter?
 
You seem tired of these tedious questions,
staring off at wild orchids, bistort, and thistle,
and, my guess is you’ve settled for whatever
symbolic gloss the pundits offer,
for you know,
 
you do not assure a fruitful season,
you do not negate poison,
you do not purify water,
and most assuredly you are not
the resurrected Christ.
 
You are content to be a quartz-white,
goat-bearded, cloven hoofed oddity,
who balances an unwieldy horn
in a magic starved world.

Hallie Moore

Hallie Moore, raised in Washington State and educated in California (Stanford University, BA, MA; Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA), now calls the Texas Gulf Coast home. Most recently she is the winner of the 2013 Blue Light Press Chapbook Contest. Her poetry is currently on display in Houston on an 84 foot photo wall on Main Street . Other work has appeared in The Texas Review, Borderlands, Spillway, Blue Mesa Review, Calyx, Moondance, The Adirondack Review, Suddenly, Persimmon Tree etc. with work forthcoming in Sugar Mule, Black Heart Magazine, and Pirene’s Fountain .