I have made of myself a rabbit.
I can no longer speak. Language
is only the click click click of my heart
ticking faster now.
I stepped out of my dress.
I autofilled myself. I slipped
the grey skins over my head.
I know you love to watch the animal
of me, my fast-pounding brain.
How I enter the garden
to pluck berries with my teeth,
then the (...) (...) (...) of my leaving.
I know you love to watch the end
of me. I vanish beyond the field
whose borders I built
with your thousand barbed unsaids.
I vanish into the sky.
I vanish into the moon,
this lemon slice of dead volcano.
Here I wait, my fingerless ears
poised as satellites, projecting my rabbitshaped
silence on space’s blank walls.
Something I don’t understand about myself
makes people want to hurt me.
Jenny Molberg's debut collection of poetry, Marvels of the Invisible, won the 2014 Berkshire Prize (Tupelo Press, 2017). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, Boulevard, Poetry International, The Orison Anthology, Best New Poets, and other publications. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is co-editor of Pleiades. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.
