Gunshots

Gunshots

 

Across the highway

some local boys

are reading the second amendment

out loud

 

Or maybe it’s just fireworks

this time of year

Both jolt me out of sleep

on warm summer nights

 

The boys un-rack their rifles

from pickup cabins:

pop-tops hissing

over campfire crackle

 

emboldened by onlooking girls

with nervous smiles

and then

the violent little pow!pow!

 

pow!pows! pulverizing empties

Come September

these boys and their dads

unsheathe 20-gauges

 

and scan the sky for doves

over fields nearing harvest

Good hunts like

corn popping in the clouds:

 

hot kernels rain down

on my roof

those Saturday afternoons

By fall’s end

 

the rifles return

to thunder across daybreak:

a scoped roar

stills the earth

 

for a time

I lie in bed thinking

That’s the one

That’s the sound

 

of one of those boys

taking a life

in a clearing

I cannot see

 

but know to be nearby

 

*Published originally in TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Volume 9, 2021, Issue 2