print previewback CLAUDIA EMERSON
Single Shot
I cannot recall which birthday it was,
my ninth or twelfth, when my parents gave me
a single-shot .22—and a sewing machine.
The machine was unwrapped, only a pretty bow
on the closed top of its shiny new cabinet,
purposeless to me as a casket. The rifle
they swaddled in shimmering paper, gave it
a matching bow at the end of what I knew
was a barrel. I had asked for neither.
~
My father never killed anything I knew about,
and still he kept what had been given to him
as a boy—a shotgun, a rifle or two, all bundled
tight as the old, their thin bodies in thick
bed quilts stored underneath the bed. He taught me
to shoot the way he taught me to swim,
to read, to recite verses from the Bible.
~
The husband of my youth ate no meat
for twenty years and still he kept loaded
guns leaning in the corners, You never know,
he said. Once he had just gotten out of the shower
and noticed a skunk stumbling into the yard
in full daylight; declaring it rabid, he grabbed
the shotgun, ran naked into the yard to shoot it.
How we laughed at that. When he was drunk,
and there was nothing else, he shot up the sky. 
Face
Blindness
Single Shot