A Long Poem

When I first wrote this poem:

     The title was "A Game of Snake and Chicken." I was thinking of Cordwainer Smith's classic short story "The Game of Rat and Dragon," but in the poem here, they're dealing with a cockatrice instead of a hideous space monster. Hence the "snake and chicken" part, y'see.

     I sent it to Cosmic Roots & Eldritch Shores, the webzine who published my short story "Collaborators" back in December of 2024. They liked it, bought it, sent me a revision, and the title had changed to "Impossible Eggs." Cockatrice eggs figure into the plot, y'see.

     I rolled it around in my head for a while, but that title seemed too focused on a single aspect of the story. So when I sent in my revision of their revision, I changed the title to "Scrambled Expectations." That got the eggs in, but it also addressed some of the larger themes I hoped the story was addressing.

     When I got the next revision, the title had changed again, this time to "Perilous Stare & Friendship Fair." And that's the one it got published under Sunday evening.

     Our 1st-person narrator is a unicorn named Zarayeb, so of course most of the story's told in rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets. That's the language of magic, after all, and unicorns ooze magic from their very pores. Talking without rhyme and rhythm is just plain unnatural for them.

     Or at least I assume that would be the case. Anyone who's actually spoken to a unicorn, feel free to correct me.

                                                                                Mike

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