Grace Cavalieri

Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. I watched behind a turret of sand. If I could have cautioned the mother rabbit I would. If I could summon the Bunnies to fit him in beneath the belly's swell I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing for some equity. This must be why it's called Wild Life because of all the crazed emotions tangled up in the underbrush within us. Did I tell you how the smallest one, black and trembling, hopped behind the kudzu still filigreed with wanting? Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species, creature development? And what do we say about form and focus— writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days, before Pizza came in, at my Grandmother’s restaurant, in Trenton New Jersey. My grandfather is rolling meatballs in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy by coming to America. Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce. Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean, sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after cops delivered him home just hours before. The waitresses are helping themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer, playing the numbers with Moon Mullin and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942, tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents. With anchovies, large, 50 cents. A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm). How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix, would stand outside all the way down Warren Street, waiting for this new taste treat, young guys in uniform, lined up and laughing, learning Italian, before being shipped out to fight the last great war.