Listen to Jennifer Luebbers read her piece:
Come back, Girl
alter the world so
the city
is not
a moonscape
pitted with bafflement
make it
Thoreauvian
give it woods and
a pond and a vegetable
patch
where rabbits
sun revise so the man
with the gun is absent
and the gun
is plastic and
the gun is yours and
you are five years old
again and
running barefoot
through the garden
and the woods and
you are
fast as a rabbit
Fast-as-a-Rabbit Girl
and make the gun
pink and
pressed close
as a doll or revise
so you are found
alive now
you’re thirty-
five now it’s not
a gun you hold no
doll but
a daughter
and you must teach
her to run fast from
the man
with the gun
because he will be
back won’t he
and if you
want the Girl
to survive how can
you tell her other-
wise how
can you keep her
from the market where
bodies are pink and skinned
and hang
on hooks