OUR LADY OF THE SACRED RABBIT HEART
The world has to witness
There’s me, beer as the school
kids come home.
Decade since I was a woman
walking home from work
in athletic shoes. Still
I ignore my electronic mail. I spend my
time. I’m an observer
of all the food others eat
off paper. I’m making a museum
out of intern’s rejections
of my
art.
The Grotto where I House the Love I feel for My Life is made of living rabbits.
It is always breeding
out of all regard for economy, or need.
I continue to ignore my electronic mailing system. I spend
my time on the allergens. The flower
flesh at liberty in the city arteries. Street, sidewalk, sub
way.
Fairytale, Another Life: 1/time
a master of acting instructed me
Do Not Direct The Audience To Imagine,
Imagine For The Audience.
As the flower flesh floats freely I imagine
opening my mouth & articulating an excess
of cotton. A cloud of gosling. An inversion of grey
of the age I suppose I will one day exhibit.
What can’t fear make us say? I try
not to give up on Earth. I walk to a museum
and touch a taxidermied dove.
If I empty myself enough
to remember the freest man
I ever knew, I almost levitate.
I like magicians
more than mind doctors. Maybe
I missed the Mirror Stage
all together, or I didn’t
and insisted instead I had no reflection.
Either way, a way of knowing and now
I wonder
what would it feel like
to never look in a mirror
again?
Out of other people’s car windows, ear
buds, I repeatedly hear
a song on the subject
of a young woman vomiting
in her own
bath. Everything happens for a reason,
the bartender explains to the bartenderess.
In the greenhouse earlier in the afternoon,
I pressed my spine to my organs and experienced
the surplus room my lungs enjoyed. Extra
oxygen & magnified light emitting from many
windows open finally
to no witness
and overhead clouds only inverting
to radically reshape lake as well as the
braceletted mist encircling dim towers; mundane
droplets, super weird water blooms.
Envelope it all.
Delivery:
why am I ever surprised?
Underfoot, it occurred
to me more roots than I could
envision. & animals,
& every originary point.
But I started at the intersection
of love & excess.
I was explaining about my Rabbit
Shrine.
It’s been not even a year now,
I’ve looked in a house in a town
on a street in a thicket &
known it as the place time extends
from. Why I
decided not just to love but to live like the living free things,
the little suckling babies. Yes, birds.
But also cycling
flowers. I wonder what sort
of wind is required; I mean
I feel like if I don’t
fly, or furrow, or
otherwise
grow
an apparatus for gripping
I will not glow. I will grit
under, become a radical trash.
What’s worst about garbage is not dirt
but that it is always flowing in one direction.
LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL LANDFILL
…………….
……….
……
If I want to talk to you about dreams, is
is it economy I mean? Okay, so it has been
about 30 years I have been alive and only
now I am overwhelmed by flowers so full
with fluid each bends their bow and breaks
not it, but themselves. Honestly, I don’t know
their names. I don’t open my electronic mail
& a rabbit eats a flower whole in the yard of
the house on the road in the thicket & this the
only exchange
the only abacus to tally my love,
bad math my ultimate faith
Candice Wuehle is the author of the chapbooks curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER* ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015). Her work can be found in Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, The Colorado Review, The Fairy Tale Review, SPORK, and PRELUDE, among others. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas.
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