Epistle from the Hospital for Text Messaging

Jenny Molberg


I have made of myself a rabbit.
I can no longer speak. Language

is only the click click click of my heart
ticking faster now.

I stepped out of my dress.
I autofilled myself. I slipped

the grey skins over my head.
I know you love to watch the animal

of me, my fast-pounding brain.
How I enter the garden

to pluck berries with my teeth,
then the (...) (...) (...) of my leaving.

I know you love to watch the end
of me. I vanish beyond the field

whose borders I built
with your thousand barbed unsaids.

I vanish into the sky.
I vanish into the moon,

this lemon slice of dead volcano.
Here I wait, my fingerless ears

poised as satellites, projecting my rabbitshaped
silence on space’s blank walls.

Something I don’t understand about myself
makes people want to hurt me.