untitled (work in progress)

Once upon a time there was a human person that loved rabbits.

They vacillated between the preference
for linguistic transparency and ossification.

This character, when represented
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.