Once upon a time there was a human person that loved rabbits.
They vacillated between the preference
for linguistic transparency and ossification.
for linguistic transparency and ossification.
This character, when represented
in text, seems invisible without a gender.
in text, seems invisible without a gender.
Circumscribing their identity seems a great deal harder without the use of pronouns.
But this person resists the history their genitalia tells.
Themes weave through their life in high, flat clouds.
They can't be held to the earth
in rivulets, the carved channels of stream beds.
Perhaps it is the extent to which their body has been regarded as permeable
that they embrace a transitoriness in their relationship with identity.
Perhaps their life is an exercise in being named.
Nyx is their pronoun as often as possible.
Night and a sheath like the skinny clouds
that glide across the face of the moon.
Nyx is wreathed in
Nyxselves, and they are
always leaving.
__
The moon is a sleeping rabbit.
Nyx stares out at its heaviness.
The moon is a different thing each night, like a heart.
Nyx remembers when it was a red-gutted slash
over the black hills of central California.
It was so visceral and terribly
open. It
was the body of the bleeding
rabbit exposed
and Nyx wanted nothing but
to penetrate it.
With this desire a pull opened from within them
The vomited heavily onto the dark floor
as their moving train car traveled north.
__
No one had fucked them in a short while
and the desire was a shock
to be inside the moon
to hold its slippery guts
to move silently and slowly back and forth
lacking nothing.
there had been a spark
of anger at knowing
S____ a few nights before.
They had decided to sleep in the Jesuits mission
after that
after that audacity after they had put their damp nose
to Nyx's cold dry nose
after they had dared to fall asleep like that
after they had dared to hold Nyx in their arms
after
a lot of nights of ignoring them
and their slippery guts
and their ankles
and their ability to lock tight
lock tight around a neck
__
This is an exercise in feeling the other side
of safety
of returning to where it hurt
where it started to rot
where it became gangrenous
where it fell off
__
a return to when Nyx's doctor said
dismissive that the skin was necrotic
that the body was killing itself
from Nyx's genitals
"it looks herpectic"
and three years later Nyx dreamed of a white rabbit
covered in scars and horrible wounds
a white rabbit that they drowned
in an industrial sink
their arms spasmodic,
a tension in the muscles.
