Rosebud Ben-Oni | Poet Wrestling with Bunnicula in the Challenger Deep

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan, a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a graduate of the Women’s Work Lab at New Perspectives Theater in NYC. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013), turn around BRXGHT XYXS (forthcoming from Agape Editions), a contributor to The Conversant and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, The Journal, among others. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog, and recently joined the Creative Writing faculty at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Rosebud Ben-Oni's Website

Also by Rosebud Ben-Oni: SOLECISM Matarose Tags G-Dragon on the 7 Axolotls Do It Better, So Now I Am An Axolotl

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Tundras

November 6, 2018
Poets Resist
2018 Midterm Elections
Special Feature

Rosebud Ben-Oni

Poet Wrestling with Bunnicula in the Challenger Deep

Deep sea will be the last place without borders. If they have their way. Will never find. Or name. Most life. Here has no eyes or ears. & no pleasures they claim. More men have floated. Through outer space. Than four leagues beneath. They claim. Everything. Is their death trap. Exclusively. & tense. & sinking. But we know ways beyond. Our tunnels aquatic. Coming. Undone. Oh wet & sweet. Vampire bunny. They’ll never grasp. Hold or sour on little bunny-powered. Nautilus. Tearing through blue & luminous. & vamping. In bunny darkness. How bare skin thirsts through neoprene. Is how you breathe me. & freely. Is it possible. To explode without moving? The lovely spite of nitrogen. For oxygen. & what building pressure does to chemistry. Altering what a body. Can take. Breaking my neck without even. Biting. How little they know us, my salty. Vampire bunny. & our dwelling breathless. & unseen. Entwining on ocean floor where they think all there’s to suck are rotting whale bones. & molten core. Unreached. Is what presses my neck. To your teeth. Without taking. Further & deftly. What I could give, tightly. & at such. Depths. How we get each other. To come. For. & Against. We come. Without moving. We come as the only thing unmoving at the bottom of the sea. Untouched. &. Undiscovered.

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