If I say I am writing for you, one who does not read poetry, perhaps you will make a list of things the unicorns represent. You who know my loves to varying degrees, you who were my first love or my second. You may not realize that if a poem overuses the word "love" it is an inferior poem. Also the word "poem."

Powdered sugar mixed with water: food to attract the unicorn I last saw when I was ten. Grownups don't explain that ten is the only magical age. It's the sight of those white hindquarters that clues you in. You saw them too, the rainy day you turned eleven.

Perhaps this is my art gallery for words. Your eyes are important to me now. I hold them in my palms and rinse them off beneath the faucet. They blink and disconnect. The filters of persona are the least of the things that keep us apart-- more important are things such as chalk, cornflower storm clouds, hundreds of miles.

When I was ten, I hadn't met you, except as children. At six and seven, you were not the people you have become; was I? I was a child who imagined herself opaque, paper wings, who flew alone and was forced to be solitary.

"Guess how she met her boyfriend? He raped her." This is the way you meet in fiction, not in poetry.

Let's see, what have I chosen to wear today? My jeans, my companions who clutch me around the waist. Like a lover I've tired of. I dip the brush in silvershimmer and paint my clothes off: the only goal I've retained, and I've achieved it.

The typhoon blows my flesh right off my bones. What I'm searching for: distillation, even through pain. To be boiled down. Which is why I keep you near, to grip each letter by its handle and snap it against my skin. Cover my skin with my own hot blood; I will not run.

The birds shrink, sneak out the window and go hunting.

Fisherman dip their water-colored nets, as if to catch a unicorn. Well they won't. Unicorns swim in Arctic waters, or so the scientists tell us, where fishermen refuse to go. Tusks spear the ice, the vast bulk of the bergs under water. You, with your insulation, can swim there. But beware: if your horn becomes embalmed in the ice, you will drown.

I am no virgin: at 26, this does not shock. But I want your hands in my hair. How many times have I used sex this way, as an excuse to look into your eyes? Not many. How many times have I used a kiss this way? Oh many, many! And I am not sorry. Given the chance, I would do it again.

Something aching, echoing behind my brows. Wearing crepe or chenille. Making myself more real, but without the vulgarity of a name.

I ran out of water again. My whole life, I keep having to re-dig the same goddamn well.

The caffeine starts to kick in. My hair starts to curl me back into loneliness and childhood, and the hoof comes closer. Your crystalline hoof. It's been sixteen years but I think I can still lure you somehow. Maybe with a kiss. Maybe with this.

Maybe with poetry, which is free.

"I may very well get fired when I tell them I need three weeks off for the holidays, but once I'm trained, they can't take that away from me. Being qualified to work at the ubiquitous Starbucks isn't something to sniff at. That's like a 'get out of unemployment free' card for every city in the world."