Killing the Rabbit: Ars Poetica
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Killing the Rabbit: Ars Poetica*
You have to hit it on the head with a hammer, good and hard between the ears. You will think of hunger, as its tongue preens its wet nose and its legs buck air and its eyes roll back into its skull. You have to think of killing
as a kind of weather: you make the fewest incisions and bleed the body, slipping your hand into the chest cavity so the innards come free and the whole skin can be peeled off.
You’ll want to make use of the lean shell and ignore the gut pile. You won’t mind black flies buzzing over your work; you are used to critics.
You will want heaven and hell, celestial certainties that the soul may travel into mercy.
You will think a long time about how the creature does not cry out.
You will bring the knife into your sleep. You will hear the cries in your dreaming. You will think about the tenderness of the killer: hands excavating the cavity, holding open the animal so our eyes can get in. [End Page 781]
Amber Flora Thomas is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and Rella Lossy Award. Her first collection of poetry, Eye of Water: Poems, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Braid: Poem, her second volume, was a finalist for the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award and has yet to find a publisher. The Rabbits Could Sing: Poems is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in 2012. Her poetry has also appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Orion Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, American Literary Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she lives.
Footnotes
* Originally published in Hunger Mountain 14 (2009).
