Swallowing
Savannah Bradley
After he leaves, I sleep with my stuffed rabbit each night. Pink and unclean, begrimed by its slow lug behind me since childhood, tucked into bed beside me. When I wake, I stumble down the hallway and stand at the end of it, the living room wide before me− _ the yawn of a cracked open jaw, wide and hot. The mass of my hands are bloated, feet slick and stuck to the linoleum. I hold my rabbit by one paw, it dangles at my side. My wrists sticky inside of my pajama sleeves. I realize what’s left of me: bookshelf, armchair, rug. My small thrift store trinkets glare from the floating shelves in the wall, pushed closer to the edge each time the door shuts. No one, he said, has ever pushed me so far. I kept myself in a box of old grocery lists beneath my desk− artifacts. I read them and realize I have been somewhere I shouldn’t be. I’ll stay up all night again, igniting light after light, dragging myself around in a gown, reaching out to rip my knuckles across a stretch of brick wall. The wind like a hand up my skirt. I’ll go back into the apartment, step into the empty mouth of the living room and sit in the armchair, legs to my chest, my rabbit on top of my knees, and look out through plastic eyes.
Savannah Bradley is a Kansas City based poet and graduate student in the M.F.A program at University of Missouri- Kansas City. Bradley is the recipient of the Durwood fellowship at UMKC and also has work in or forthcoming in Bear Review, Barrow Street, Moon City Review, Barzakh Magazine and The Shoutflower.