Blake by Sarah Sala

Last night I ate a bowl of venison stew
and tasted Michigan’s sweet grass. 

I learned to sight a shotgun before
my first period, and pheasant-hunted 

just once: rambled for hours through
the tall brush, willing the jade birds 

not to startle skyward. Blake was buried
with a veil shrouding his face. 

The bullet’s pressure wave a battering
ram against the bright moon of his skull. 

When I think of Blake, I see two men
twist aluminum pylons into the muck, 

then heft docks onto crossbars for us
to walk on water. When a sniper fires 

a round he accounts for the Coriolis
effect: the earth rotates under the shot, 

shifting the target away. My dad listens
patiently and offers no answers, moves

to the driveway to wash his truck.
Works the wheels until they gleam. 

Sarah Sala is the author of Devil’s Lake (Tolsun Books 2020). She is the founder of the free poetry workshop, OfficeHours, which fosters community among femme-identified, POC, and LGBTQ+ writers. Her work appears in BOMB, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and The Southampton Review, among others. sarahsala.com