There’s a rabbit,
not Peter, who visits
my vegetable patch,

a gangland garden
of my clan that pays
a lease to the earth.

And I should refuse
the rabbit, not Peter,
my hard-grown cabbages.

A stomping, swearing,
shooting Mafioso
of the poor clay soil

my role, locked in debt
like a crazy gambling
Cortez, driven to

exterminate—
but what is a spoiled
cabbage or two,

that can be saved
for eating by the chop
of a knife: coleslaw

for the dinner table;
a dewy morning feed
for the rabbit, not Peter.

And it’s that way
that I sometimes have
the heart to refuse.