Angora Power by DM Gordon

👀 Free Sub Call Open Now: Announcing New Theme! | Micro #2 ⭐︎ Rabbits

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

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.

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.

D M GORDON is a poet and novelist. Recent and upcoming publications include Loosestrife for Porcupines, a Blue Light Book Award finalist, and Leaf Sheep, a Substack of animal poems. Two novels, Gabriel, about a lost boy in British Columbia, and a prequel about his grandmother, are forthcoming from Sibylline Press. Her poetry collection, Nightly, At the Institute of the Possible, was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. As editor at Hedgerow Books, she midwifed eleven books of poetry into being, several of which were short-listed for national awards. Short works in multiple genres appear widely, from The Cincinnati Review to SWWIM. She’s a former equestrian, studying with members of the Olympic team, and holds a Master’s degree in Music.