Bunny

We left
Our dream
Place
In October 2020

Someone in Florida
Was sick
Had forgotten
We’d all forgotten
How it used to be

We left California
For where we used to live

The night we landed
I ordered hibachi from the old Japanese place

I open the back
Sliding glass doors
To see
The pool and my first ever backyard
I can’t see
anything, though
It’s too dark

I sleep
I wake
On a floor
Mattress

I brew tea and
I open the sliding glass
And see
a brown bunny
I exhale

A few days later we notice a bad smell coming from the dryer
“It smells like death,” we say, and kind of laugh
We’ve never smelled death before
We hope we’re wrong

The smell gets worse, heats up
We call the rental managers
Help

Men come
No one can figure it out

One guy finally tears into the wall
He says it’s the biggest rat he’s ever seen

But then
No
Once he sucks it out with some kind of carpet vacuum
He tells me

It was a bunny

The dryer vent cover outside, he says, was
Broken
The bunny hopped in
But it was too narrow for him to turn around

I weep with such violence that
I wonder
If
I’m going insane

Home doesn’t feel
Like home anymore

In October 2021
I wake up
To a flood
In the living room

They don’t know where the water
Is coming from

More men come
I try to show them that
I think
It’s coming from under the wall
No one
Takes me
Seriously

More men come
One finally decides to check the wall
As if it was his idea

They create a giant hole in the drywall behind the broom closet
Then the jackhammer

They finally find it
A copper pipe the size of my pinky
A hole the size of a sewing needle

More men come to fix the hole and demolish the kitchen and suck up the water and try to rebuild

Every time they repaint
The paint is the wrong color
And they have to go back
To remix

I try to eat my breakfast outside
Away from the chaos
But for the first time since we moved back
It’s freezing

I stay outside
In a puffy coat
Clutching my tea
Looking for bunnies
That never come

One night out to dinner a few towns over
We drive by unexpected fireworks
The next day
I decide to move there

We break a two year lease
Escape

The first time I walk my dog around the lake
I see three brown bunnies

I haven’t seen any since
The hurricane, though

But in Pennsylvania
To graduate with an MFA I decided to get sometime between the bunny and the flood
It snows
I see tracks, heavy hooves
I ask my winter friends on Instagram what animal they think it’s from, a deer maybe? I’m not sure.
But no
They tell me
It was a bunny
It’s puffy tail making an imprint
As it hopped through
Fresh snow