We plan our escape from our basement classroom.
My students share memories of school shooter drills.
I share what police advise—run. Trees blush and undress,
but the scratching outside our window is not the dead

we fear to be. Today in the news I read rediscovered stories
collected by Irish schoolchildren of household medicine
and hags who became rabbits to lap milk from cows, though
I don’t know why a witch would need to, why she couldn’t say

I’m a mother like you, hold her own cream in her cupped palm
for the cow’s rough tongue, and ask for the kindness returned.
The moon occults the stars in Taurus, and my son performs
his sadness over an otter that died at the zoo. He blinks slow

and sniffles back octaves of salt. I don’t know where he learned
to do this, to be an understudy to the keening of trees planted
too close to houses. I read him Runaway Bunny and say I would
chase him though all his transformations—be the gardener

to his crocus, the wind to his sailing ship, the tightrope walker
when he learns the trapeze so we can both be creatures of air.
One student says we can use him as a stool to climb from
the window well to the lawn. I am glad someone wants to die

for the rest of us. I don’t want to give my son a hero
for a mother. I want to go home to him. I want him to lose me
after years of hugs, arguments, and medically acceptable suffering,
and I would take this student’s offering to leap from his back,

like the milk-hare a farmer shot, and then went to confront
his neighbor for stealing, only to find her in bed, human again,
holding her bleeding head. The farmer warned her thirsty tongue
though he knew, as everyone did, that bullets won’t kill witches.

I will not die for these students. Or kill for them. I would draw
on whiskers and pull myself from this concrete burrow, dodge
cracks in the air, aim for the gentle corrections of trees’ shadows.
My body small enough for hiding. My ears so large they can hear

my name in my son’s prayer—red as the fear that will keep me
on earth, black as blood in moonlight, in the fur that twitches back
to skin again, my son’s arms safely around my neck, his milkteeth
and bubblegum cheeks breathing, breathing, oh, still alive.