Shotgun
The wedding photo reeks of shotgun.
The bride is blank-faced.
The groom is caught by the lens mid-tremble.
The presence of a barrel, just off camera, is palpable.
They’re your great-grandparents you tell me.
She was the daughter of a hard-drinking,
lazy slob of a farmer and his timid wife.
When he stomped through the house,
the children would scatter like chickens.
And he was the son of the widow
who ran the general store in town.
His only talent was getting the local girls pregnant –
including the wife who gave birth just six months later.
The finger on the trigger must have worked.
At least they made it through the ceremony,
lived together fifteen years, had four more kids,
during which his mother died suddenly and he
took over the store, ran it into bankruptcy
and then, at a time when he couldn’t have been
more down on himself, took a shotgun –
maybe the shotgun that was almost
in the wedding picture, and was handed down
to the couple when her old man passed –
anyhow he somehow managed to place
the barrel against his temple, slip on
the kitchen floor’s linoleum the moment
he pulled the trigger and blew a hole in the wall.
She had him put away then took the kids
and moved in with her older sister.
She didn’t remarry.
But she held onto that wedding photo
which is why you’re on the couch
this very instant, thumbing through an
old album and stopping at this very picture.
I sit beside you, as bored as a rainy-day child,
as I numbly watch you turn the pages
far too slowly for my liking.
But there’s a voice in my head that says,
“You stay boy or else.”
It’s followed by the cocking of a hammer.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work forthcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
