burrow raze you are salt and cheap shampoo i'm digging down to where your sweet exhausted heart is living slicing through vines with these flesh-covered knives if i could speak i don't expect you'd try to understand if i could weep my tears would terrorize this city's streets 170725 ... ovenbird There, a rabbit, soft fur the blue-grey of clouds banked over the mountains, mouth full of dry leaves, vanishing suddenly into her burrow near a high traffic path by the river. She’s caught out by humans, fascinated by her disappearing act. They crowd the entrance to her sanctuary trying to get pictures to feed the algorithms. She emerges to the paparazzi, phones flashing, voices too loud. I can feel the panic buzzing in her body as she looks desperately for a route of escape. She darts away but soon returns. No threat will keep her from the kits who are tucked into the nest underground, helpless and sleeping. I try to ward off the interlopers. “She’s probably terrified!” I say but they just laugh, lean in closer to capture the whiskered face as it pokes out to see if the coast is clear. It is not clear. I know her tiny heart is thrumming in her chest because I can feel my own doing the same. I’m too afraid to attempt a more forceful intervention and later I regret that I didn’t try harder to protect her. I know what it’s like to be menaced by people who see you as a commodity rather than a living thing with a soul. If I could, I would dig my own burrow far from the trampling feet of men, and make myself a bed of cattail down and pine needles, and curl myself into the radiant heat of the earth. I would eat tender shoots of grass and sweet clover and never feel that I’m wrong for this world. And when a Northern Harrier found me I would surrender to the sharp talons of fate, my body a sacrifice to the hawk’s swift beauty. And, for a moment, I would be free from gravity’s torment. 260122 what's it to you? who go blather from