To Be Hunted

-after Jericho Brown’s “Duplex”

Prey is something hunted, like a rabbit startled stiff when seen through a gun barrel.

Hunting is a form of prayer which is answered when bullets meet feathers or fur.

Prayers are answered by bullets when the pleas are camouflaged by feathers or fur.

My dad used to hunt birds and rabbits. Now we pay for his treatments in prayer.

A treatment in prayer: fathers are hunters but so is sickness. Birds and rabbits don’t pray.

Doctors are players. They promise recovery pressed into powdered pills to paying prey.

There’s transformative power in pills, more so than in promises. We pay to play doctor.

Play act as my mom, crying as father hung rabbits from their little lucky feet in the trees.

Running on lucky feet doesn’t get you far. Not far enough from dad, from little rabbit cries.

Camouflaged, I move silent as a prayer, crayon scribbles like wax wounds on the walls.

We can wax poetic all day about wounds, about hiding them, about prayers written in crayon.

Pain is not so easily masked by pills, hate, and silence. Prayers don’t save hunted families.

Rabbits are prey to hurting, hating, pill popping, stillness. Hunting is how my family prays.

Prey is something hunted, like a rabbit startled stiff when looked at through a gun barrel.