I stretch out Thursday afternoon
until it is see-through at the edges.
I talked to so many people today
and all of them chanted: go west
but maybe that’s not what’s best for me.
Down south is crawling with ***** whispers
and I want to pull them out of the ground
and rinse them clean. Like vegetables
spread out on the kitchen table
in late September: orange and purple
and the scent of soil heavy
by the open windows.

At my aunt’s house,
as a kid, the mudroom was my favorite place -
transition point between low-ceilinged
dark and quiet inside space
and the impossible Vermont sky,
the chickens and the garden
and grass that sloped down to a valley
the size of my child fist. Sometimes in the evening
we’d see coyotes creep from the shadows
of the trees down below, or hear the foxes cry.
We would hike up the gravel road
and climb the mountain before the sun set,
scramble back down in the dusk.
I wish I remembered more
than just picking grass and slowly
splitting it into strips, to learn the way
my hands were capable of deconstructing.
But it came in useful later,
when we went into the woods
to strip the birch trees of their bark:
the best kindling for fire.

So smoke rises and chases us.
To keep the smoke away,
my aunt says, you have to think
about white rabbits. Little
does she know - my ideas
are always half-baked or burnt.
Never the way they should be.
So I do what I think I hear her say –
and I think about white rabbits,
covered in mud.