Another soft skull thumps
against the Humvee bumper.
built for ramming and momentum.
We wouldn’t notice
if there weren’t the sound.
Somewhere in New Mexico
we're the loudest things.
No one needs to say nice or fuck yeah
anymore. They know
I still want to swerve.
The instinct
toward gentleness,
like the jackrabbits’
tendency to stiffen
in the magnitude
of headlights, looks
like fear, so I curb it.
Collateral Rabbits
Graham Barnhart
Graham Barnhart is the author of The War Makes Everyone Lonely, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.