That Year I Took My First Shot
by Jacob Griffin Hall
What does it matter, then, whether in the picture I hold
a petal or a pistol? Either way the colors are distorted
with time, either way I am a child and the sky surrenders
to the trees. Long before I asked who are my people
there were photographs of people and there were people
without photographs expelled from the clearcut land.
Hand in hand, we walked the rows and planted photos
of our people with petals or pistols below the yielding
sky. In the picture I’m talking to my sister. Long before
I acquired language, language laid its claim to me
like a gunshot claims the quiet in a growth of evergreen
and I spent my summers tending white geraniums
uphill from the firing patch. What does it matter what I hold,
gun or flower, caught mid-sentence in a property of light.
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