Rabbit’s Journey

Poetry by K Roberts & Annette Gagliardi

No one believes me when I tell them the story.
The rabbit died before I even knew about it.
Its lungs were weak, it breathed with a smoker’s wheeze.

And the funny thing is,
my mother’s rabbit died as well,
her rabbit that growled in its sleep, dreaming it was a tiger.

The women in my family take after my great-grandmother.
She sailed over Europe in fire and silk, in a hot-air balloon
decorated with paintings of leaping rabbits

spinning in pirouettes as the balloon rose higher and higher.
Great-grandmother was old and new,
borrowed and blue. She sailed to America as a widow bride

on the ocean liner Acquitania, where she rescued a pug-nosed stray.
She raised many rabbits and sent them to a sister in Ohio.
No one had seen tabby-striped rabbits with curly hair before.

One tintype photograph survives: the whiskey glass
and her sable brushes well-hidden. One day, I will go
to her country, to see where orange lightning strikes the silent stones.

K Roberts is a professional non-fiction writer, a published artist, and a first reader in fiction for two literary magazines. Recent publications include The Journal of Undiscovered Poets, Panorama, and the Australian journal Meniscus.

Annette Gagliardi has looked at the dimly tinted shadows and morphed illusions that become life and finds the illumination. She sees what others do not and grasps the fruit hiding there. She squeezes all the juice that life has to offer and serves it up as poetry – or jelly, depending on the time of day. Her work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, England and the USA. Visit her author website at: https://annette-gagliardi.com