By Adrian Sanders Russo

On the way to work, I pass
a plywood sign at the end of someone’s driveway
spray painted with bunny’s for sale
and yes, I know what that person meant,
but I can’t help but think that Bunny is a little rowdy, and her husband,
who we’ll call Hank, is fed up. She smokes the gas station
up the road out of Virginia Slims. Everything is pink.
The house is full of the higher the hair the closer to God
samplers and prayer candles even though her church
is at the beauty salon every Wednesday morning or at the kitchen table
when her best friend and sister come over with supper.

Hank can’t stand it. He can hear them laugh out at the tool shed—
a place where if the door is closed, then so is your mouth. He paints
the sign—bunny’s for sale—hauls it down gravel driveway
and props it up on the fencing for me to find the next morning,

cast in an early morning fog. I turn around and
let the gravel roll me
up the drive to
Bunny in all her glory—
a copper-headed beacon through the dew and coffee steam
like she knew I was coming and had been waiting for me all along.

~~~

Adrian Sanders Russo is a poet and copy editor living in Elizabethtown, KY. You can find her poems in journals such as Juke Joint, Maudlin House, Indiana Review Online, Fish Barrel Review, and others. She is a recipient of the 2025 Kentucky Foundation for Women Writer’s Prize and the 2027 Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. She is the author of two chapbooks, This Side of the Dirt and Lynchian from Bullshit Lit and Alien Buddha Press respectively.