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.