Brooklyn Writer Pens Poem About Gowanus Bunny-Hoarder

GOWANUS, BROOKLYN — Amy Holman likes to look at the news for inspiration for her poems, she says, "especially ones with strange news, the strange ways in which people behave."

Holman lives in Gowanus and works as a writer and literary consultant, teaching students and working with private clients.

When she stumbled upon a Patch story about Dorota Trec, who illegally kept nearly 200 bunnies in a small yard behind a tire store in Gowanus, she knew she had her next one.

"At first I thought the poem resided more with what happened to the rabbits, and then I was just trying to get my feel for how I wanted to write the poem and I felt like I needed more info," Holman told Patch.

So she went back to find other news reports about Trec's arrest, trial and eventual sentencing.

"I went back, and the Daily News had a report from the arrest, hearings, and then there was the point where she went to court," Holman said. "And each time they quoted her about why she kept the rabbits. And each time, she had mentioned something entirely different.

"And then I thought, 'Oh, this is more about this woman, this is a loon. And it just got too much for her.'"

Holman allowed Patch to print her poem in full. You can read it below. (We first spotted it on The Five-Two, a collection of poems about crime.)

SEE ALSO:

• Last Of Gowanus Hoarder's Bunnies Believed To Be Rescued From Longtime Lair
• 2 More Bunnies Found At Gowanus Lair; Hoarder To Be Released March 24

Amy Holman

I'M A RABBIT GIRL

she says, and it's a child you see
in a room full of bunny toys and art,
not a music teacher in her mid-thirties
in Brooklyn, defending herself to the press

after the arrest. They need to be
wild, she says of the meat rabbits
saved from butchers, the lab testers,
Netherland dwarfs and Belgian hares

who listened to her flute, but you'd see
a tasty meadow with burrows and buttercups,
maybe her grandmother's farm in Poland,
not 182 cold bunnies huddled behind chipped

wood in an unused tire yard. They need to be
wild game for the zoo lions, she also said once—
to her shame—perhaps when the monthly
multiplications troubled the limited space

and budget. Rabbit girl could not see
her way clear in her failed million dollar, pastel
Easter Bunny breeding project she later
passed off as an attempt to develop a children's

bunny garden under the F/G overpass. To be
caging leporidae—as a fraction were—in a
padlocked shed on the Gowanus auto strip, hops
in the face of flutey rabbit girl's pastel lion

luncheon community. But then, you can see
that with the herd biting and raping each other
and contracting syphilis, that special, confidential
quality that her first rabbit, Snowflake, shared

with Rabbit Girl, was diminished. She's to be
caged for 45 days, kept from owning rabbits
for five years, and see a shrink about collecting.
She's resisting with a suit against the bunny

activists and the ASPCA who, anyone can see,
do not want people owning animals, which,
by the way, she didn't because you can't own
what is wild, or what needs to be.

Image via Marc Torrence, Patch