My Last Hunts

Young bucks
in a car
with a pistol,
shooting up signs
on a farm road.
Spotting two doves
on a high wire,
I leaned out,
aimed,
and fired.
One fell
as her mate
flew away.

In a wheat field
that summer,
I shotgunned
the back legs
off a rabbit.
It dragged itself
forward,
screaming
like a baby.

**

After Hours

The honky-tonk closed and we
followed two girls in a Chevy,
flirting at stoplights until
we scared them home.

A man in a bathrobe
stepped into the yard.
“You boys go on now,
there’s nothing here for you.”

I started toward him and
his hand lifted. When
I saw the pistol, I
forgot everything else.

**

Grackles

The old Negro school, a one-room, dilapidated
shamble of weathered gray boards, sits rotting
down by the river, a roped-off hazard a couple
of blocks east of the courthouse square, built
far from our white schools many decades before
Brown versus the Board of Education.

Next door stands Red Top, the old jail, a sturdy
granite building with a historical marker out
front. It’s another relic of our past, clearly visible
to bygone students daydreaming out their windows,
a stark warning to remember their place. One of our
distinguished old-timers, reminiscing a while ago, said,

We let them pickaninnies fend for themselves.
Those students must have gotten the message,
because they are all gone now. This fall we will
cheer our all-white team again on cool Friday nights just
as surely as we recite prayers each Sunday beneath the
Old Rugged Crosses that adorn our town.

But today is a quiet summer Tuesday, with only a few grackles
in sight, a cock and four hens cavorting in the afternoon heat
across the courthouse’s manicured lawn. Old Glory hangs
limply above, and katydid songs pulsate in the live oak trees.
I sip the Dairy Queen’s sweet iced tea and, from a shaded bench,
watch the grackles prance. The male bobs and flares shiny

tail feathers, then struts southward in bold challenge.
At the corner, upon a carved stone pedestal, stands a
Confederate soldier–unyielding, ever vigilant, rifle
at the ready. He is our eternal truth, our tireless sentinel
who will never waver in his steadfast and protective
watch over our God-fearing little town.