Sacred traveler in the middle of transcendencenot a unicorn but a saola not apparition but actual.I wander uncertainty in my steps to pictureyou as you are a beast timeless as folkloremade to share in this humanity. I count you asepiphany having landed from your spark amongthe cosmos. You flee you defend you heal.You almost fly compassed by your horns.You roam solitary in your stead releasedto be on your own so as to surfaceon the inside with manners of a saint. I takeno part of you for granted take little hope inthe figment you’ve become. Mythical asI romance you to be you are everythingcorporeal along the timeline of this agea bovid alchemical as moonrise.
Otherworldly
When seen in profile, the saola’s horns merge into one, and the animal becomes single-horned— a unicorn by perspective. Like that other one-horned beast, it stands close to being the apotheosis of the ineffable, the embodiment of magic in nature. Unlike the unicorn, however, the saola is corporeal. It lives, and it can die. — William deBuys, The Last Unicorn
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“Otherworldly” from Primordial. Copyright © 2025 by Mai Der Vang. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.
With profound and attentive care, Vang addresses the plight of the saola, an extremely rare and critically endangered animal native to the Annamite Mountains in Laos and Vietnam. The saola looks like an antelope, with two long horns, and is related to wild cattle, though the saola has been placed in a genus of its own. Remarkably, the saola has only been known to the outside world since 1992, and sightings are so rare that it has now been more than a decade since the last known image of one was captured in a camera trap photo in 2013.
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