- The Killed Rabbit*
In its eye a convex universe: the white sea of a cutting board, the gray muffled fringe of a foot, and the whiskered spikes converging
in there, intruding equally on one another; a knowing endless with the moment of the room. No longer able to look away, or gaze past, or see into, yet obligated
by depth and light. Fixed with all that is far-gone, distilled to believe all at once in geographies, electric with repeating the truth,
not blinking away from the ceiling fan’s blades, churning the steamy kitchen air, renewed in the execution of being seen. Then you chop the head off, overcome by
the need for disregard, to remember the necessity of flesh and the crude jarrings of meat being stripped down to a stasis of red; the lean muscles of a runner and leaper exposed.
Its eye assumes a transfixed nature while gazing at black plastic lining a bucket. Displaced in all that is held there, vision is in fact a reckless understanding. [End Page 782]
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 Crab Orchard Review 10.1 (2005).