"Year of the Hare" by Maureen Alsop

Year of the Hare

In my dream I dreamt of killing
the year that caused pain. Wasn’t it
the Year of the Rabbit. Faraway,
bitterns face evening. The dead pass again
through corridors — breastbone
and meal, crimson sprouts of rye, the murmuring
above their shoulders echoes
in the frog’s twilight wilt. Somewhere

between creek and willow. Your face
being fresh among them. I imagine

entering the merciless snow, a space north of freezing, the ambient-deep —
I imagine entering my owner’s body, as if

following trail markers, reading briefly a paragraph in a manual, then allowing
darkness to settle otherwise.
Perhaps
there are two ways to bury a hare. Usually
so little caution is spoken. Hungry
stars converge under whatever leaf, in whatever
version of tree. Perhaps the strewn canopy of some prickly oak,
the lesser buds of the tree, a thousand
quivering whiskers of feral cat; radiant

as another shade hedges toward me, stillness all through the grass . . .
I dig a hole where a live rabbit might go in — stupid
bunny scrambling year disappearing under shovelfuls of dirt
or hit on the head, half conscious, either way I go on digging
until we are a bridge. Revelling the luck of a new hour, underbrush —
signals of air flattening all sound.

Maureen Alsop

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D., is the author of Arbor Vitae; Tender to Empress; Pyre; Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren (also in a Spanish Edition, Reyezuelo Aparición, translated by Mario Domínguez Parra); and several chapbooks, including most recently Sweetwater Ardour and Come, Ghost (forthcoming). She is the winner of the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in various journals including AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, DIAGRAM, Memorious, The Kenyon Review, and featured on Verse Daily. Her fiction appears at Wakefield Weekly and South Dakota Review (forthcoming).Her translations of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1892-1979) appear in Poetry Salzburg Review and the anthology, Trusting on the Wide Air. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn. She is a board member for the organization AIM Higher, which promotes mentorship for women in the arts. Her visual poetry and art have appeared at the Riverside Arts Museum in Riverside, California, The Umbrella Studio in Townsville, The Louver Gallery, Drunken Boat, Superstition Review, filling Station Magazine, and others. She is a Book Review Editor and Associate Poetry Editor at Poemeleon. She holds an MFA from Vermont College. 

Headshot: Molly Corey

Photo Credit: Staff