Amy Holman

I'M A RABBIT GIRL

she says, and it's a child you see
in a room full of bunny toys and art,
not a music teacher in her mid-thirties
in Brooklyn, defending herself to the press

after the arrest. They need to be
wild, she says of the meat rabbits
saved from butchers, the lab testers,
Netherland dwarfs and Belgian hares

who listened to her flute, but you'd see
a tasty meadow with burrows and buttercups,
maybe her grandmother's farm in Poland,
not 182 cold bunnies huddled behind chipped

wood in an unused tire yard. They need to be
wild game for the zoo lions, she also said once—
to her shame—perhaps when the monthly
multiplications troubled the limited space

and budget. Rabbit girl could not see
her way clear in her failed million dollar, pastel
Easter Bunny breeding project she later
passed off as an attempt to develop a children's

bunny garden under the F/G overpass. To be
caging leporidae—as a fraction were—in a
padlocked shed on the Gowanus auto strip, hops
in the face of flutey rabbit girl's pastel lion

luncheon community. But then, you can see
that with the herd biting and raping each other
and contracting syphilis, that special, confidential
quality that her first rabbit, Snowflake, shared

with Rabbit Girl, was diminished. She's to be
caged for 45 days, kept from owning rabbits
for five years, and see a shrink about collecting.
She's resisting with a suit against the bunny

activists and the ASPCA who, anyone can see,
do not want people owning animals, which,
by the way, she didn't because you can't own
what is wild, or what needs to be.


Amy reads "I'm a Rabbit Girl":



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Amy confesses: "Recently, there was a headline in Brooklyn about the conviction of the Gowanus Bunny Hoarder, and I knew that a poem lurked among the herd of distressed and wounded bunnies in an abandoned tire yard in the neighborhood named after a toxic canal. I had somehow missed all the other news reports—from the time of the police raid on the tire yard the day before a projected snowstorm to the arrest, the hearings, and sentencing. However, when looking for information on the breeds of rabbits kept by the hoarder, Dorota Trec, I came across all the previous news pieces, and in each, Trec named a difference reason for having kept the rabbits. That’s when I knew the poem was more about her than them."

AMY HOLMAN is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and prose writer and the author of the poetry collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window, published in 2010 with Somondoco Press, and the poetry chapbook, Wait for Me, I’m Gone, which won the 2004 Dream Horse Press Annual Chapbook Prize. Her fiction chapbook, Lighter Than A Dream was a finalist in 2015 at Anchor & Plume Press. Recent poems have been in Gargoyle, The Westchester Review, and Rabbit Ears: The First Anthology of TV Poems. This publication with The Five-Two, is her "second offense", having first had a poem up on the week of April 7, 2014. She is a literary consultant to writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and teaches poetry workshops at the Hudson Valley Writers Center. More about Amy can be found at her website: www.amy-holman.com.