Runaway Mother by Abby Caplin
Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away.
So he said to his mother, “I am running away.”
“If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you.
For you are my little bunny.”
—Margaret Wise Brown
The day we took our daughters
to Children’s Fairyland
for some kid’s birthday and stuffed them
with synthetic cake
we looked up, confused
by what looked like
a black tornado
engulfing the Oakland hills.
For days across the bay it rained
charred scraps of classics
and cookbooks from kitchens
that no longer existed.
We washed burnt bedrooms
from our hair and swept
sorrow from our sidewalks.
I found the best recipe
for baked chicken
on your front porch and used it
long after your ashes
filled the small hole
at Home of Peace cemetery.
The truth is I was five and five
minutes before my parents
crested a mountain in Montana
something happened
between a car and a big rig and the big rig
driver was sitting by the side of the road
smoking a cigarette,
his bloodied face
glittering of glass,
maybe contemplating
the dead woman
still in her car. A few months
later I looked through tiny windows
from the bed over the cab
of our camper
as my mother pulled
under the overhang of a drive-in
dry cleaner to ask
for directions.
The roof of the camper sheared off,
and I heard my mother screaming
my name through shafts
of daylight and plywood.
From such stuff bunny
mothers become fish, trees,
sailboats, even
wind.
Poor little bunnies.
So many mothers
believe this is love.
This is not love.
It is the fever of fear, though I recited
Runaway Bunny for you
until my throat cracked
and I wheezed in the night,
Let me be.
Abby Caplin’s poems appear in Burningword, Common Ground Review, TSR: The Southampton Review, and Tikkun, among others. She was a finalist for the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award and award recipient of SF Poets Eleven 2016.
(Front page image via)
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