Poetry
FALL 2024To the Woman Who Feeds the Cottontail Rabbits
by DONNA CASTANEDA
floppy heads of lettuce, lumpy cauliflower
a sprinkle of green string
beans in the hot morning
shaken out of a canvas bag falling
over the chain link fence where a giant
tumbleweed bush rears up scratches
your hands
bloody if you
pull
something
from its interior
something
like a pretty cottontail rabbit
a crowd of brown
fluff bodies hop forth
from the sharp protection
the babies so miniature
they fit into a child’s palm
converge on supermarket
vegetables although they
have no supermarket
only coyote snuffles
and pitched barks at night circling
the perimeter
of their scrub home
a liturgy of kindness for the most
hunted among us this chapel of small things
Donna Castañeda
Donna Castañeda is the author of the chapbook Show me the road—I’ll follow the lilt of your shadow (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and her work has appeared in Crosswinds, The San Antonio Review, Litmora, Green Linden Press, and Cholla Needles, among others. Her MFA in poetry is from Antioch University, but before that she earned her PhD in social psychology and was a professor at San Diego State University-Imperial Valley for thirty years. She lives in Chula Vista, CA, near the US-Mexico border.