Prey

after Gerald Stern

In your child voice you ask about the rabbit, so small, so brown, the one we interrupted on his way to the lettuce. Or maybe to the carrot stems, pale and just new against the overturned loam. Why, you ask, doesn’t he run? Or bare his teeth, claws held up to protect himself? After all, doesn’t every animal carry some form of protection: fists or color or ink, a sound or a fragrance? What can I say, knowing the girl I was, like the hare, like the hare, like the hare*--a rabbit rooted on the sidewalk, too dumb to understand my own changing body as the reason for the cat-calls from cars, whistles from passing trucks. I simply understood that they saw the real me. Rabbit, rabbit waiting to be skinned, ready to be braised.  

Rachel Neve-Midbar is a poet and essayist. Her first full length poetry collection, Salaam of Birds was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize and was published by Tebot Bach in January 2020. She is also the author of the Clockwork Prize winning chapbook, What the Light Reveals. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Georgia Review and Grist as well as other journals and anthologies. Rachel, a current PhD candidate at The University of Southern California, is also editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation for the AuntFlo2020 Project. More at rachelnevemidbar.com