Tuesday poem #307 : Erin Emily Ann Vance : Alice Discovers all the Rabbits are Dead

After Stephen Sexton

A little girl with frilled pink socks

and daisies in her braids

crawls into the stump of a plastic tree

to say a gleeful hello!

to all the dead dears inside.

Hello hedgehog!

Hello little mouse!

Hello mister owl!

Fairy doors open

to reveal a stuffed finch on plastic moss

and a field mouse

hiding its glass eyes

from the sticky fingers of children.

Everything here is for touching

a curator sings,

Snow White with an electronic security pass

on the third floor of the Ulster Museum

a princess of taxidermy

and plastic play sets.

Low to the ground

three fox cubs are curled together behind plexi glass

eyes glued shut

like a stillborn cerberus.

This is where the little girl

with frilled pink socks

and pinch-red cheeks wonders,

for the first time,

why the animals lay so still

and silent.

everything here is for touching

the living and the dead

and the in between

This thought does not linger;

a bushy tail hangs like a feather duster

in the playhouse,

the girl plays tug-of-war with the plastic tree

reaches to pet the hedgehog and squeals

at the spines

scraping her flesh-ripe palm

before running to mummy.

Everything here is for touching.

Everything,

Everything,

Everything.

Erin Emily Ann Vance (MA Creative Writing) is a fiction writer and poet. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry summer course at Queen's University Belfast in 2018, and a will be a fellow of Summer Literary Seminars in Nairobi in December 2018. A recipient of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize in 2017, and a finalist for the 2018 Alberta Magazine Awards for fiction, her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including filling station and Contemporary Verse 2. She has a chapbook with Lofton8th press and a leaflet with The Blasted Tree. Her first novel will be released by Stonehouse Publishing in Fall 2019.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan