"Screwed by the Easter Bunny"
My two-year-old son scrapes rabbit shit from his shoe
with a twig from a dying tree. He tells me,
The Easter Bunny isn’t coming this year.
No baskets, no eggs, no chocolate critters to behead.
He’s not coming, my son screams.
I tell him rabbits don’t have thumbs,
therefore, they could never hold a basket
or palm an egg with plausibility still intact.
Rabbits certainly don’t have the giving instinct,
or the desire to watch a loved one’s eyes light up
like a pair of suns rising behind a closed tomb.
Starting next year, I tell my son, we’ll stop
celebrating rabbits and resurrections on Easter.
Instead, we’ll toast to the absence of ghosts,
the empty spaces beneath the sink.
And in place of painted eggs, we’ll stuff our fists
in our mouths, then joyride through cemeteries
listening to the static hum on AM radio.
Like a room of cynics, drunk at a séance,
we’ll cry shenanigans as we shift the candle’s flame
and scoff at the things we don’t feel or see.
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