Blood Orange; A Poem

It's ****ing red.

This was taken from my prose poem phase.

Fun fact about this poem: I performed this at a poetry reading at my university library. Upon reading the title, a woman immediately walked out. She did not leave after a poet before me used the phrase "catch a n***** by the toe" in his poem.

Blood-Orange … It’s Fucking Red
I honestly couldn’t tell if the lump on my driveway was a dead animal or a hat that had been turned inside out. It was clear to me that there was fur on the underside pressed against the wet pavement – whether from a rabbit, a squirrel, or some synthetic fiber factor I don’t know – but I sincerely could not deduce whether the matte sheen red-orange surface was the inside of some animal or the satin lining of some hat.

Had I been any more certain of its identity I surely wouldn’t have stooped over and shoved my face into the scene like I did, but my curiosity persisted. The proximity didn’t provide any helpful details: it smelled distinctly like dirt and leaves from a foot and a half away, but I’ve never gone out of my way to smell carrion before and I’d expect an old hat to smell no different; there was no wreckage around the thing, which I would expect if I had hit it with my car – though at slow speeds in the driveway I don’t know if the animal would have slowly exploded, like a water balloon in the same situation, or be swiftly knocked out of consciousness and life like a brick to the head – but the birds in the area that could have easily eaten away the remains; and the edges of the mass looked cleanly constructed, but I know nothing about bunny anatomy.
​
Unable to decide, I pushed the thing over to a small patch of grass next to a tree – fairly isolated, the tree was mostly ornamental – and covered it with sticks to cover the unknown. Part of me was proud that I had done my best to give the poor thing a semi-proper burial, and the other part was concerned that I just hid someone’s hat.