Soft, Softer
A mess of rabbits, a mess
of squirrels. I remember
their tiny bones, their falling-
off flesh stewed in gravy.
Sop it up with white bread,
a salty thin savor tasting
of the can of Bunker Hill
beef my granny would mix
with it and the quick heartbeat
in the trees, the tremor,
the brown fur, the pasture
at dusk, the skin ripped off
the meat, neat slice at the anus,
a bouquet of squirrel tails
thrown to the dogs and what I wanted
most of all as a child
was a rabbit-skin coat,
to wear such soft wealth
to school, a clover-fed abundance,
the closest I could get
to the miracle of small mammals
I could touch as much as I wanted.
Annie Woodford is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019), which was a runner-up for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry. Her second book, Where You Come from Is Gone (2022) is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize. Find more at her website, anniewoodfordpoet.com.
On Pleasure: “This poem, like much of pleasure, remains a bit of a mystery to me, slightly embarrassing, probably revealing in ways I can’t quite control. At its center is the paradox of wildness—how we yearn for it, but how it can’t be possessed without destroying it in some way. My granny used to make rabbit and squirrel gravy. I did actually own a rabbit fur coat in first grade. These days I keep trying to live and eat with a greater moral awareness of the lives of animals.”