Bunny

Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves

A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again

(Is it me drowning you, Samantha, or did you wade in here of your own free will, your pockets full of black stones?)

Well. Because I love you, Bunny. Actually. You’re actually my favorite.

You’re my favorite too, I lied. But in that moment, I meant it. I meant it so much I cried.

“The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.”

Why can’t you be happy? Why do you always assume the worst about every situation?

And just like that, we go back. To how it was before. A winter like last summer.

Better just lie here. Alone on the breathing bed. In this room that is too hot then too cold then too hot, depends entirely on the whims of the radiator god. Chills singing through my body now like an aria

Because the violence of this place, existing as it does in the fragile heart of seething poverty, doesn’t exactly feature in the script of the Warren campus tour,

The mothers always look around the campus like extremely interested buyers, their jeweled hands rubbing the backs of their fawnlike spawn as if to say: This could be yours, this could be yours. The future students gaze hungrily or with proprietary ease at a campus green that shimmers like their own skin,