Queer as Dogs

The first time I saw a rabbit with myxomatosis I was maybe ten years old. It was dusk and I was walking back to the car with my parents. I noticed it as I was climbing into the day-warmed backseat, a little scrunched shape, crouched among the nettles as the light leached out of the sky and swallowed it up. Its eyes were milky and staring, and I wondered why it was so content just watching us.

The second time I saw a rabbit with myxomatosis I was absolutely fifteen, rooted in that age and all its implications. I was walking with my dog, a hand in the ruff around her neck and feeling her heartbeat. Beneath the willow bent and singing was a tiny brindled grey-brown body and her dogheart needed to know it. She sniffed at the hunched and blinded thing, its heartbeat slower than hers, and I dragged her away before she could lick at its waxen fur, breathe the wrongness in its air. I didn’t know how sick it was, but I didn’t like the way it was so content just watching us.

The first time I saw a girl naked I was sixteen and I felt like that rabbit. Not just caught in the headlights but calm, so calm, and so content just to watch. Her heart beat slower than mine, much slower, and in my ears the rushing was so loud that for just a second I was tucked beneath the willow’s wind-sung and whiplike fingers. The touch of her searching hand brought me back to myself, where I found I was dying slowly and unable to see anything at all but the backs of my eyelids and the shadow of her hair drawn like a blindfold across them.

I was twenty when I learned myxomatosis was a human creation. A drawn out and painful culling method; punishment for the crime of being vulnerable and alive. I had spent my adolescence working the land and I wept when I saw the cruelty of purpose I had thought to be the winding will of nature. I had spent my adolescence vulnerable and alive, and I wept when I realised the cruelty of extinction.

Now I am twenty-five, I think of my dog, the sweetness in her seeking and sniffing. I think of the first girl, and the mercy in her mouth. And I remember other dogs and other girls: I remember other kind snouts and searching hands, gleefully entwined, in the face of an uncaring world.

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Rabbitfeet (they/she) is a queer, non-binary writer who enjoys exploring gender, queerness, and nature. Their tales are those of the very human through the lens of the non-human. Expect mangled word choice, a little terror, and transcendental joy. And animals. Lots of animals. Find them on Twitter: @rabbitfeetpoem