She’s bedded      down in the hollow
of her mother’s     expectation.
She’s dug           for her furring
curves               a gaze-escape
that’s her            retreat from
the family den       of sex inequity.

There, under-           ground, her Flopsy
self’s centered in       her better nature’s
itchy need for              separation from her warren kin.
Her little hole’s            a burrower’s
Wonderland              furnished with
a little desk               & chair of knotty pine.

Holed-up,                hermit-like—
this booby hutch         her escape hatch—
her invaginate          imagination takes
a pubis-eyed view       from her earthen
nest of premature       self-consciousness.
Her precocious            interiority’s

like a tulip bulb,        dirt-bulwarked;
a Netherlands         in hiding
from predations          of the hawked
model of                     femininity to which
she’s promised         her tawny beauty marking
her as a fancier’s        or furrier’s moving target.

She hankers in                     her bunker, nests.
She doffs her rabbit coat,        & scribbles code
in her moleskin notebook       as self-preservation gesture.
She’s turncoat                      to the topside’s
topsy-turvy etiquette         expected of game girls. 
Haunted, she broods       her hunted selves.

                        [from the Antioch Review, Winter 2010]