Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you the winner of our second Micro of the Month challenge! The theme was Rabbits and you guys…I had no idea y’all loved rabbits so much, haha. Karan and I moved this month from the US to Canada and mostly what we were reading during that time was your micros on rabbits…it was a delightful experience and I’d have it no other way! I hope you enjoy the piece we’ve picked as much as we did.

Details for June’s Micro of the Month Writing Challenge

Opens: NOW!

Closes: June 3, Midnight

Theme: Love & Sex

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I lift the kit from her cage to cradle her lop-eared comfort. She knows my hands. She knows the dark. Light. Alfalfa, piss, droppings. Her mother’s teats, my human smell. To be so small, to be made airborne, placed on my long thighs. She doesn’t bite. Maybe she should.

We are entangled, this baby and I, two hearts beating. If it’s a race, hers is winning. Mine is in the running. She can’t know promises, the ones I’ve made, the ones I’m breaking—how hard it is to be honest to oneself. She can’t know the voice in my head and how it’s different from what I say to you out loud, how even the truth I tell myself is fiction, how everything I know is a story that I’ve shaped.

What can she know of story? So sits this baby with her translucent ears, her tiny brain of happiness, or anxiety, or indifference. She might know my cardigan is her relative. She might feel me shrink when you appear. She doesn’t know the splintered guitar, or where I’m bruised. I stroke the unearthly soft of her, or earthly, for what is she but of the earth. She doesn’t wear a watch. Or read the news. Better than the poet, she knows the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. She would eatthe flower. I will eat the roots.

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Contributor’s Note

What does a tiny rabbit, a “kit,” newly arrived on the planet, feel when I put it on my thighs and stroke it—it, with 40 million years of deep instinct as prey, knowing it is edible, and what that does to the heart—and me, as predator. I delight in its adorable self. Soft. Vulnerable. Safe in the knowledge it won’t bite. Does it feel safe? Or is its stillness an act of self-preservation? I have voices in my head about which it can’t have a clue. It knows what it knows, which we underestimate if we’re being true to form. I’m interested in how animals perceive their lives, how we perceive ours in that context. We are, as a species, egocentric, but each being, walrus, kit, scarlet mite, is equally as important to itself. I feel reverence for those unique lives. Here, the leap to fiction becomes what happens when you put these worlds and consciousnesses together, when the human is a different kind of vulnerable. Or is she? She is psychological prey. She is thinking that everything she knows is a construct in her mind. Maybe she’s thinking she should bite. She is thinking this rabbit knows something deeply fundamental, something important, something she doesn’t.

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LEAF SHEEP

Poems about animals. Poems about us (with animals). All the creatures, great and small, one poem at a time.

By D M Gordon

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you our first ever Micro of the Month! We received 473 entries for this call which was open for just three days and it was especially difficult to pick a winner. Ultimately, Meg’s charming piece emerged as the most delightful and also with a sweet spin on our April theme of The Fool.

MOTM submissions will always open the first three days of each month and the theme will be announced either the day before or the day of. For May, you’ll get an email on April 30 for the May theme alongside the submission link.

All submission call posts will have a dedicated section now and you can turn notifications for these posts and emails on or off here.

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That year Mr Potato Head became Anya’s changeable dad. He wasn’t a mad dad or a bad dad or a sad dad or a rad dad. He was kind, simple, mute. Wore a blue plastic hat and had flabby lips. His pets were sea monkeys and his friends were matchstick people and his eyes were round as moons as they stared straight ahead in a foolish way. As a nose, she screwed in a pink ear. He looked like a misunderstood dork, off-kilter but kind— the sort of person one might meet at the grocery store and feel sorry for, the kind of man her mother, once she grew nicer again, might invite over for a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. After a while, shoots grew out of his head. When Anya felt mad at him she poked in a villainous moustache and sunglasses, replaced his ear-nose with a bulbous orange blob. Then, she took him for a ride all over the neighbourhood, potato juice stinking up her fingers.

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Contributor’s Note

Write about a toy and expand into a bigger metaphor

There’s a good deal of unspoken backstory in “Mr. Potato Head”. It’s told from the point of view of a young character who was removed, when very young, from her unstable father and who now lives alone with her angry, divorced mother. The micro derives its strength from small physical details about what having “a dad” means from her changing perspective. It is a collage piece of imaginary masculine features and vague memories of a father, never knowing what to make of him in hindsight. It is also a story of how sad it is, to Anya, that her mother has become closed off and untrusting. The plot, if you wish to call it that, is internal, psychological. Anya is trying to make sense of it all by doing something active (ie making a changeable version of a dad by swapping his features) and she takes the reader on this exploratory journey. I love writing from a child’s point of view. Kids are highly creative and resilient, which balances the fact that they are also endlessly vulnerable and too trusting.

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Microfiction Workshops & More with Meg Pokrass

Meg's upcoming workshops posted here. Paid subscribers can participate in a private "submissions support group" on a bi-monthly basis, hosted by me. Subscribers receive $10 off of Meg's solo-taught workshops and editing requests per project.