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The Rabbit, a poem by Hiromi Yoshida

The Rabbit
by Hiromi Yoshida


How did the rabbit cease
to be just a rabbit? After all, it wasn’t pulled out of
some spuriously glittering magician’s hat
to begin with. Instead, it

evolved into a furry little carcass on the sidewalk of E. Atwater Ave. across from my house—speckled with buzzing flies in the noonday sun. It

then became a sooty viscous mess—oozing blood and stench in 90° F heat, an
environmental hazard for the City of Bloomington’s
sanitation department to clean up.

By the third day since its discovery,
(possibly) it had melted into the sidewalk—an elongated black pancake
of visceral goo (surely, I was disinclined to confirm its decomposition status
despite my intensely voyeuristic curiosity).

By day five or six,
(possibly) it was a dark viscous stain like treacle or molasses—
or a sticky shadow etched upon the sidewalk—in either case, a hairy
furtive thing projected from my abjection-prone mind in the thick humid
evening.

And perhaps because only I knew that once upon a time it was
a rabbit—a shadow that had returned permanently to the conjuring
magician’s glittering hat, a stinky epiphany,
Rabbit in Paradise (R.I.P.).


Bio: Hiromi Yoshida has been described as one of Bloomington’s “finest and most outspoken poets” by Tony Brewer, Chair of the Writers Guild at Bloomington, Indiana. Her poems have been published in The Asian American Literary Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Evergreen Review, and The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society.