Killing Rabbits

They used to inject women’s urine into rabbits to see if the rabbit’s ovaries changed. Yes, meant pregnant. Either way the rabbit died, but the term came to mean: You are pregnant.

In Language Arts we learned this: A great rabbit created the world and a pantheon of 400 rabbits regulates Earth fertility. They eat many types of sacred lettuces, they sip their milky juices.

I have connectivity between the hemispheres of my brain. I am gaining white matter. My luteinizing hormone is coming out of my pituitary gland like a waterfall. I am estrogen wise. I am hCG girl: I have killed a rabbit.

Hormones have been changing my body. Hormones make gymnastics more difficult. Tumblesalting with hips, a tipped uterus. I fuck around. Oxytocin releases. I feel love in a world I despise.

Whereas, birth control pills made me feel like crying at Clash concerts.  We use the pullout method instead, though I have read the “Our Bodies, Our Selves” my mother left around for me to find. Her body needs no birth control. Mother doesn’t like dicks, she digs estrogen.

I like penises. My father tells me I am like my mother. This is confusing. I shave my armpits. I fuck around, read “Watership Down”.

Oral Contraceptives deplete Vitamin B6, cause disruption in tryptophan metabolism. Growing white matter creeks in my brain. hCG makes my boobs hurt.

At this moment I am alive twice at once in the rabbit moonlight.

Whereas, on the pill B6 deficiency causes disorders of depression and anxiety and even psychosis. I’m tired all the time. I try to dance. I fuck around, read “Watership Down”.

Thinness is necessary for dancing and fucking: I eat lettuces and lettuces, only from my fridge. I read by the rabbit moonlight.

I go to Modern Dance school. My grandmother is the teacher. Everyone has hairy armpits. I feel my uterus tipping more. I have killed a rabbit. Now it is one rabbit. In a few years it will be two rabbits. This is before the abortion clinic bombings and pregnancy tests you can buy at the drug store.

Why must a rabbit die?  I look to the moon where the moon rabbit lives, the grim reaper of rabbits who appoints when they will live and die.

Once Peter Rabbit was almost killed in Mr. McGregor’s garden. Peter Rabbit ate soporific lettuces. Lettuces that make you sleepy. Very sleepy. Large nurses give you something that makes you very sleepy at the clinic, but it is not soporific lettuces.

Disaster: I am sleepy, bloated, and I will never tell my grandmother why I am quitting Modern Dance. I think I smell: I spray Opium all over my body. How to wear a pad in my Capezio before the invention of “wings”. Can’t wear my gymsuit there.

Once lettuce was an aphrodisiac , associated with the Egyptian God of Fertility, Min, for resemblance to his very vertical phallus.

Everything I touch wilts except penises.

Strokes, heart attacks, dizziness, breast tenderness, moodiness.

We use pullout methods.

I am a free woman because I place my legs in stirrups and kill a baby and a rabbit. Full moon that night. We fuck like rabbits, take acid, watch Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes.

Death is everywhere and pretends to be life, eats too much dirty lettuce.

When I stop bleeding I do flips in the air, hit my hips against the wood of uneven bars in the school gym. Bruise myself for flight. I am a gymnosophist. I flip. The pamphlet in the tiny box of pills says: hormone, anemia, mood swing, dry skin, racing heart, racing thoughts, sweat. Penises: What are they?

Sometimes they wilt like lettuces, mostly they don’t.

I don’t use birth control because (                             )I am lonely

and won’t understand this for forty years. I don’t use birth control so nothing bad will happen to me in the afterlife, or this life, or in a parallel life. I don’t want more hormones. I am not a bioassay test.

Since pregnancy tests have become simplified, no ever says “the rabbit died” anymore.

My Peter Rabbit figurine collection from England and my grandfather’s Beatrix Potter books line my bookcase under my Joe Strummer poster.

Once upon a time there were four little rabbits….and a beautiful garden.

There is a garden one must not go into to. It is written.

Side effects: Migraines, vision problems. I am not seeing reality correctly. I am the moon’s prisoner. Flashbacks or psychosis?

Babies are angels that make heaven open up to me, and I scream on the table lying that I am eighteen though I just turned fifteen. The terror follows me everywhere. A space inside me.

Once upon a time there were four little rabbits…I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter! ‘One tablespoonful to be taken at bedtime.

Death, rebirth, D and C.  (Blood clots)

Run. D and C. I die to myself. My bed is bloody.

Rabbits die everyday for lack of what is found.

I crash my car, it flips three times. (Breast tenderness. Dizziness.)

I can’t die. And I can’t find my parents anywhere. (              ).

I have killed the rabbit. And it is
.          inside me.

________

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of ‘The Republic of Self’ a New Issue First Book Prize winner. Her second book of poems, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances” won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize and named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker. She has just completed a third poetry/hybrid lyric essay manuscript, “Atomizer”, which will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2020. Her novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” was published in the winter of 2018 in the U.K. with Leaky Boot Press. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, and recently forthcoming in The Common, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review,  Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Pleaides, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University, and serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.