Elegy for Bunny by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller


Bunny told me once, walking through a park at dusk, how smoking crystal meth felt: like horses galloping through his veins. That’s how he described it: like horses galloping. He went to India with a photograph of the guy who gave him HIV, kept the photograph in a freezer for two months, then buried it. I spend an afternoon reading about the electromagnetic fields around our hearts. I grow out of myself the way roots grow over a grave. I wake everyday rubbing a seam I found in the stratosphere. Bunny started saying he heard voices in the walls, in the floorboards. He started calling straight people “breeders.” He told me that he saw a dead pig in the canal, bloated, where there was no pig. He drove north, to the Russian River. And one day, he simply disappeared. No. Not simply.

Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller’s collaborations appear or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Sophie is the author of Two Open Doors In A Field (University of Nebraska, 2023), and Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books); Corey is the author of You and Other Pieces (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Man Vs. Sky (YesYes Books). Individually, they’ve been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and beyond. Currently, they live in the same time zone. Though they’ve been writing together since 2012, they have only met once.