It's Easier To Kill A Running Rabbit Than a Sitting One.

I'm a Lousy Husband But I Did Make Cacciatore.

On slaughtering day I do my best to quiet my mind but the neighbor 
is felling trees, pulling stumps, playing two radio stations at once
and a wren is scolding me, calling my bluff as I feign peace, 
picking a last meal of bitter thistle from the field
for the rabbits. 

The first shot passed through the head and into the ground 
spraying dirt over the whole place I’d just readied,
the clean bowls, gleaming 
one for rinsing, one for organs, one for guts, now full of sand. 
I’ve always been skeptical of second chances, but here I am. 
I begin again.

Each rabbit remembers how to run,
just after the shot 
sends them, kicking, 
through dreams, like sleeping dogs.
Blood coagulates, quickly. 
Sal licks it, slowly, from their noses and where it runs between my fingers 

this is what dogs are for

to clean our hands and look at us tenderly 

when we’ve done gruesome things

the saints of second chances 
sparing me the chill of cold water
her tongue, forgiving, 
warm and wet as rabbit’s blood,
it’s the same, she reminds me, again. 

It’s easier to kill a running rabbit than a sitting one. Harder to hit with the shot, but easier to pull the trigger. In its truest form, a rabbit will hold hold hold then run, streaking away through the brush, tripping the wire that alerts your ancestral predator, hungry, who takes the reigns, and your body moves, feline, to kill the rabbit before your modern mind knows what to think - it happens in no time. Hunting is millennia of muscle memory.

Raising rabbits, however, caging them, feeding them, breeding them, stroking their velveteen noses each morning, then, one day, pulling off their skins - is a new twist in the age-old agreement between predator and prey, which used to be straight as an arrow.

Time is the problem with animal husbandry, there’s too much.