Charlie Sharp
Lucy
is the rabbit who lives in my parents’ front yard.
Which is to say, every gray rabbit in the yard is named Lucy,
like a lineage of kings,
a conglomerate of bunnies
hopping in solidarity under one banner,
proudly declared
Lucy,
In perpetuity,
who has lived as an adolescent
outside my mother’s bedroom window
for as long as my mother has been naming
the rabbits, the raccoons and squirrels.
Lucy
fits in the palm of my hand,
the way I fit in my mother’s.
He doesn’t recognize
the soft-coated girls in pictures
taken before he was born.
They are his mothers,
and they are him.
They are
Lucy
in an album,
age one,
age ten,
age seventeen,
too old for one rabbit,
a living book of
Lucy
in snapshots,
stunted in her suspension,
time slowed to a stop
in the soft clover of the yard.
Lucy,
a hundred fuzzy pieces
in a hundred old pictures,
a dynasty of splinters bundled together
in a rough approximation of
one gray rabbit,
Lucy.