Kill the Wabbits 

April 25, 2025

Three little kits appeared one morning in the back corner of Hop’s hutch,  writhing sightless as moles in the straw, pink as the little piggies  on my baby brother’s smooth, un-walked-on feet, hairless as a Brazilian  sauntering barefoot along the breezy Copacabana. 

I didn’t realise till well into adulthood that those plump 

little piggies weren’t on their way to shop at the markets, armed  with plaid-lined picnic baskets swinging in the crooks of their chubby Michelin arms. The ol’ cad Hip had gone in for the snip a week prior; evidently not before shooting a bullseye. These mewling miracles  were a surprise to us all. 

Hop was unprepared for motherhood; rejected the wriggling worms as though  she’d had an unwanted teen pregnancy like those you hear about on the telly, where the ditzy girl hadn’t even known she’d been pregnant—thought she’d simply  been bloated and crampy the night a baby plops into the toilet bowl out the back of Chick-fil-A. 

I’d tried to save the orphaned souls. They didn’t make it through the night. I found their bodies huddled together, frozen stiff under the heat lamp. Gave them a shoebox burial in our backyard under the blood  

orange tree that was still just a sapling. Cried for a week over their lost souls and my survivor’s guilt. My then-husband told me I was being silly.  That it was simply the nature of nature and I was foolish for wasting my salt on such expendable creatures. I guess that should have prepared me  for when I lost our child in the womb a couple of years later. Chastising my tears on Mother’s Day, he said but you weren’t even a mother yet.

Paris Rosemont

Paris Rosemont is an Asian-Australian poet whose work has been published in Verge Literary Journal, Red Room Poetry’s ‘Admissions’ and Heroines Anthology (vol.4.).
In 2022, Paris was a Living Stories Competition judge, WestWords Academian, Frontier Poetry scholarship recipient, awarded an Arts Access Australia mentorship, WestWords-Varuna Emerging Writers’ Residency and was named runner up for the Writing NSW x Varuna Fellowship 2022.

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