This poem first appeared n the Winter 2010 issue of The Antioch Review.
BUNNYHOLE
by Coco Owen
She's bedded down in the hollow
of her mother's expectation.
She's dug for her furring
curves a gaze-escape
that's her retreat from
the family den of sex inequity.
There, under- ground, her Flopsy
self's centered in her better nature's
itchy need for separation from her warren kin.
Her little hole's a burrower's
Wonderland furnished with
a little desk & chair of knotty pine.
Holed-up, hermitlike—
this booby hutch her escape hatch—
her invaginate imagination takes
a pubis-eyed view from her earthen
nest of premature selfconsciousness.
Her precocious interiority's
like a tulip bulb, dirt-bulwarked;
a Netherlands in hiding
from predation of the hawked
model of femininity to which
she's promised her tawny beauty marking
her as a fancier's or furrier's moving target.
She hankers in her bunker, nests.
She doffs her rabbit coat, & scribbles code
in her moleskin notebook as self-preservation gesture.
She's turncoat to the topside's
topsy-turvy etiquette expected of game girls.
Haunted, she broods her hunted selves.
***
Coco Owen lives in Los Angeles and has published poems in 1913: A Journal of Forms, CutBank, The Journal, Rio Grande Review, and The Feminist Wire, among many other venues. She has chapbooks forthcoming in 2016 from Tammy and dancing girl press. She was a finalist in several recent book contests, including for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Owen serves on the board of Les Figues Press and you can read more of her work at http://www.cocoowenphd.com.
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