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