After the Rabbits
art by Virgil Suárez
by Lex Williams Page
A year passed before I finally noticed
the rabbits missing from the yard.
After spring came & went & with it the grass
& the mowers & my duty to this earth—
the question of the garden,
whether I would tend to it this year—
& last summer’s strawberries nestled in beds
of cocoa mulch, budding again & needing new nets,
all uneaten, when April arrived,
& even in June.
No white fur caught in plastic nets.
No hidden holes beneath long grass
to catch my feet while I paced, cutting.
No dens & so no bodies to be held by them.
At first, I thought a fox must have done this:
come in March to steal the bunnies
while their mothers were away.
I thought of red coats against white snow,
what I might have seen & disregarded
as nature’s common course.
But once my eyes were open,
I could not look away:
in John’s yard, green patches of parsley
wilting, confused,
after seventy years of pruning
cottontail teeth,
& come September, every garden down the creek
rotting just the same.
Called my mother in Montana,
where the hawks had shrunk bone-thin,
& my brother in Indiana,
who’d seen no warrens since summer thunderstorms blew in.
Months passed & again came winter’s white,
hunter’s orange blaze against a November-blank night,
recalling to mind the last year’s
fire-filled nights, watching from the window
as swarms of them came
with their bags & their guns,
snapping small spines.
Muffled chirping screech.
In the morning, stumbling across something
wet & pink & gruesome,
too terrible to name
& so, we did not.
& that month, the snow fell heavy
& so, we forgot.
But someday, we will all have seen
how the rabbits vanished by spring.
Lex is a transmasculine poet from Madison, WI. He graduated from the University of Virginia and has poems published and forthcoming in the Mid-Atlantic Review, Virginia Literary Review, V Mag at UVA, The Madison Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas Magazine, and Atlanta Review. They can be found @lexbeepage on Instagram.
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING’S LAST MOLT, was be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020. He is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and an Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida and a Latino Book Prize.
