When I moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex in 2016, one of the first things I noticed was a conspicuous scarcity in access to natural areas. Where I’d lived in Washington state and Tennessee, I could hop in the car and get lost on some path through the woods in 15 minutes. In Texas, however, it took extra time and effort to seek out those wild places. Having relied on natural landscapes for inspiration, I was worried that Texas would leave me dry. Perhaps Texas gave me the push I needed to grow as a writer. Who knows. Eventually, I found myself writing about Dallas’ own particular mix of the ‘natural’ and the ‘urban,’ the ‘suburban’ and the ‘exurban.’ This poem in Spillway is one such example, and I’m very grateful to editors Patricia Smith and Lynne Thompson for giving it some space in their latest annual edition (number 29!).
On a related note, the impetus for this poem was, in part, a tweet from the musician Perfume Genius. We had gone down to the flooded river, seen the swimming rabbit; I wrote a note or two about it in a journal, and let it sit there for several months. Then, one day I saw his tweet about ‘swamp rabbits,’ a real species of semi-aquatic rabbit that lives throughout the southern U.S. Eventually, I connected the idea of the rabbit to my child to the river itself.