Rabbits.

Rabbit liver was the best.
Its stronger taste was from
the iron and the other stuff
that passed on through its spongy purple meat.

At least that’s what our mother said,
And she would know,
and so
we ate it all.

Every morsel, every bite,
of rabbit that we ate,
we knew where it had come from.

Dad had shown us how to take
a rabbit from the cage,
none of them had names,
and tie its feet
up to the nail that was hammered in the wall.

Next you’d stretch its neck and whack away,
a good strong shot into the spin,
and watch it twitch awhile till it stopped
and then you’d slit its throat
and let the blood run out in streams
and splatter on the driveway,
blacktop,
by the hose and faucet.

Dad would take his knife
and carve it up the middle,
the rabbit, calm and never moving.
He would reach in
and pull out
gobs of stringy stuff,
red and pink and squishy warm.

He’d let us try it too
and show us all the wonders
of the insides of an animal
who’d only recently stopped breathing.

The gall bladder, which was never missed
and never broken,
green and small and foul smelling,
was thrown away into the trash
can first.

Its rancid taste
was bitter bad and ruined all the meat.

We marveled at its power to destroy
the joy
that we had killed an animal to produce.

He’d take a handful of the fur and, with a yank, would start
to peel off the clothing of our dinner,
strip it bare,
and then
dissect the choicest parts of that night’s curry.

Hot and spicy it would tingle
as it passed our lips and mingled,
made us thankful for the fact we were not
rabbits.