The Rabbits of Upland Road                                                                          —Frannie Lindsay


You are going to lose everything.
The funeral home will show up to gather
your father beneath a velvet shroud.
The red potatoes will sprout in their basket
inside the window. Someone will wash
and fold the bedding and give it away.
The neighbors’ visits will stop.
The art will assess at barely a fraction
and then you will run out of
boxes. The plants will wither. No one
will want the rare books. In time,
your handwriting, too, will tie itself
into mad tangles. You will never
be granted the mercy you pled for.
Your hoarse voice will startle you.
But look: two brown rabbits
have popped naïvely out from behind
the lilacs. In their lovely identical eyes
rests the gem of everyday trust. It needs
no faceting. Then the evening blinks although
it is nowhere near dark, and leaves you
alone with just enough thanks
to tear off one more rag.

Frannie Lindsay

Frannie Lindsay’s fifth book is If Mercy (The Word Works, 2016). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, Field, Hunger Mountain, Salamander, Best American Poetry 2014, and elsewhere. Frannie has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is working on her sixth collection. She offers writing consultations in any genre. She is a classical pianist.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2018