Breadcrumb #503

CINDY TRAN

I stepped into the lamp-flooded night to watch my dad smoke
and stood in the driveway, in the long middle of his shadow.

It was spring. A smaller shadow hopped. I ran after it,
laughing, a bunny, a bunny! I ran back to my dad

and asked him to help me catch it. He went inside
and came back out with a cardboard box,

oily from bobbins, throat plates, and stop latches.
Together, we ran down our street, chasing a long-eared

shadow, lit by living room lights. I looked inside
the box and the bunny looked at me. What should we name her?

伊是兔. It doesn’t need a name. I named her Bunny
Rabbit, thinking I was clever like my dad, who once said

he named me 美華, true, familiar, and foreign to him.
At home, the lights were off. And in bed, I heard the night

bite into a cigarette at the stove. I heard Bunny Rabbit scratch
the cardboard as if to dig down—I turned to my side

and hoped for a different name. Six months later, she died,
but I didn’t know why or how except that its teeth

grew so long, it looked like a baby brown walrus
sleeping on its side. When I told my dad the 兔

had died, he shrugged and stamped out his cigarette
by my mom’s rose bushes.

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