THE FIGHT NOT KNOWING

I remember asking for the pellet gun,
finding it under the Christmas tree.
That winter the birds were too fast for me.

All the boys at school could shoot.
I’d been told to practice. Front
and rear sight lined on the bird

and the pellet would go straight to.
I could never hold the gun steady.
The pellets would arc, miss completely.

Guiding hands would try to still me,
tell me not to breathe, to slow
my heartbeat, better to go in

without humanity. The first bird I killed,
the pellet shot upward into its chest.
It screamed, fluttered unsteadily

from the tree where it was perched
and fell to the ground
in the yard of my next-door neighbors.

I undid the latch to their gate to see,
came back in a few unnerved days
to find it overrun with ants.

Its feathers ruffled, its eyes still open,
pained, as if in a permanent state of dying.
I started up again, lizards this time,

for their difference, each looked
into the barrel with curiosity,
moving only to die

with the pellet’s slip into their bodies.
I remember one crawled up
on the poles of the deck,

sticking out the red flap under its throat
as I fired. The pellet grazed its back.
Blood welled from it as a drop from a pipette.

Down the stairs, I found him, shot him again
to end it but failed, didn’t have it in me to shoot
a third time seeing his mouth open

as a human’s, fighting. I stood over it,
not knowing, watching that flap under its throat
flare weakly until it didn’t.

__

Dustin Pearson is the author of Millennial Roost (Eyewear Publishing, 2018) and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review. He holds an MFA from Arizona State University.