by Isaac James Richards
As a boy, I collected shotgun shells
in a tacklebox my grandpa gave me.
As a teen, I shot a yearling elk
on a Montana ridge at dawn, watched
my father drag it down the mountain
while coyotes and wolves howled.
As a young man, I moved away
for college, never bought my own
snow skis or camouflage. One year
at Thanksgiving, my cousins and I
practiced shooting my uncle’s illegal
AK-47, semiautomatic .22, and
some other guns I don’t remember.
I knew I was gun shy growing up,
my father said as much. But the first
gun to really scare me was my own—
a Glock gifted by my father-in-law.
After church that Sunday, still wearing
his wingtip shoes, he held a black case
and beckoned me. We hovered around
the kitchen table. He unlocked its clasps.
I married his youngest daughter.
Her auburn hair still reminds me of Idaho
October canyon leaves and other things:
ears ringing with buckshot, an antelope’s
glossy eyes, that calf elk I killed at fourteen.
My dad wants to give you a gun,
she had said a few weeks prior.
I didn’t even blink then, but seeing it
in his hands, in our apartment, against
our corduroy tablecloth, was different.
My body went still except my heart.
I thought of deer whose hearts stilled
before their kicking bodies. Thank you,
I said, trying to hold it without shaking.
This is an ancient ritual, a tradition
that some part of me still understands.
This man is an Air Force veteran, this gun:
a trust. He just wants me to protect
his daughter, and even she wants a feeling
that she’s been taught to call “safety.”
Or maybe this is all about getting along,
having at least some kind of manly bond.
There’s no clear villain, if there is one,
here, as when Jesus said to Judas, do it
quickly. If to kiss can mean to kill, then
perhaps I, too, must betray in order to save.
Lord, shall we smite with the sword?
somebody once asked Christ in a garden,
and his reply was to heal a soldier’s ear.
Sometimes a hunting rifle can be a sacrament
in the hands of a steward of the earth,
but a weapon is something else,
the very cup of trembling.
::
Isaac James Richards has poems published or forthcoming in Amethyst Review, BYU Studies Quarterly, Christianity & Literature, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Inscape, Heart of Flesh, Irreantum, Wayfare, and elsewhere. His fiction is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review and his creative nonfiction has appeared in LIT and OxMag. He has received poetry awards from the Clinton F. Larson, Hart-Larson, and Vera Hinckley Mayhew contests as well as Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominations. His book-length manuscript, Fisheye and Other Flash Fiction, received an honorable mention from the 2024 Utah Original Writing Contest. He’s currently studying rhetoric and creative writing at the Pennsylvania State University. Find him online at https://www.isaacrichards.com/.
Image: Amy Burgess
ID: Brown buck in fall foliage.
Psaltery & Lyre 