Anna B. Sutton
Anna B. Sutton is a poet from Nashville, TN. She received her MFA in Poetry from University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she worked for Lookout Books. She is a co-founder of the Porch Writers' Collective in Nashville, web editor at One Pause Poetry out of Ann Arbor, MI, and on the editorial team at Gigantic Sequins and Dialogist journals. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, Weave, Tar River Poetry, Sundog Lit, Pinch, and other journals. She recently received a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.
Postpartum
The barn cat slinks onto the porch and stretches out across a swatch
of afternoon sun. Last night, she left a tiny, headless rabbit bleeding
on the mat. Did you know a baby rabbit is called a kit, short for kitten?
It’s a funny thing, the way we name our progeny. A kitten is not a cat—
or a rabbit, even; an infant is not a man. The sun was once something
called a protostar—an embryo born under the weight of a dust cloud’s
own collapse. Billions of years later, the barn cat is picking fur from
between her toes, and somewhere in the tall grass, a rabbit is missing.