Features the Other Poetry Workshop with Peter Armstrong and Jacqueline Sephra.

Skinning Rabbits

by GILL McEVOY

You shot ten rabbits, laid them on my doorstep
with a note: "For your freezer. Merry Christmas!"
They were like a problem from my school-day maths
I couldn't solve: ten long, leggy things
with soft grey fur and eyes like sad dead fish.
You had knotted their feet together and when
I lifted the bundle they swung from my hands
like heavy ropes.

I found my mother's pre-war cookbook.
It knew how to do those things that no-one does:
cook in a hay-box; pluck and dress a fowl;
hang pheasants; make beef jelly. Skin rabbits.
The steps were exact: first cut off the feet,
make an incision in the belly, peel back
the skin - it was like stripping a tangerine -
slip out the hind legs, ease it over the buttocks,
up the spine, around the head, down the front legs;
remove skin. Then gut and clean.

I did not know that skin could look like that,
that it could hang so separate, so sorrowful,
like those mittens children lose left hanging
from railings like unfilled Christmas stockings.
The limp, moist bodies lay as innocent
and pink as babies after baths.
I could have hugged them up in big warm towels
and sung to them. I knew I'd never eat them.