Nick Rattner
Icon for Bunny
The unnamed mineral the heart keeps cleaning
must be blue,
the color of everything I can remember
Bunny ever wearing.
My recollections are blue
as I am headed home now,
where with a pen I send up angels,
indivisible of sky. It’s all peace
from here, as from this sky I want to see
Bunny’s blue jersey on the asphalt court
where we played basketball three hours a day,
his Tarheel shorts, us calling the other’s card,
I’m sending you home, motherfucker, and to see
the path we took to the building where Bunny stayed.
I remember watching Bunny take his handkerchief,
navy blue, from his head and lay it over his mouth
to catch flakes of the bedframe’s steel as he carved
stars of his own constellation, stars
for the next boy, a blue for others. I couldn’t help
I had a family to go back to. He never met them.
If he sees this, Bunny’s smirk will be the scrape
of the flint of the blue lighter we used to light
our smoke after a game, bluer
than sky we blew smoke into.
Nick Rattner reads “Icon for Bunny”
Nick Rattner lives in Houston. Recent work has appeared in / will soon appear in Fence, Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Asymptote. At present, he is translating the work of Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román.