The Season's First Complaint
Ashley Hudson
The horse steps on the infant rabbit.
What follows is all pink
foam and screams. The yellow-black
buzz sting kind of hyper in me.
Antique white car floating through the avenue,
the fallen fuchsia buds. Is winter
a memory I am choosing to forget?
The leaves hold onto so much
red and the clouds move
where they choose though
their shapes are mostly mine.
The horse is dragging hooves through the blood
drawing its dirigible in the dirt,
and the car opens its trunk wide
to show off my January slaughters.
I keep staring into kind weather
until my eyes bloom their bluest tears,
and the rabbit’s silent scream moves
as heat’s wicked wave off concrete,
until all the feral and macabre shifting drags itself
into hiding beyond the sweet flowers
where one might find the hand
offering such a strange gift as season.
Ashley Elizabeth Hudson is from Athens, Alabama. She was awarded the Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art poetry prize. Her poems appear in Six Little Things and most recently in the Southeast Review.
