Landscape with Past and Future
by Marlo Starr
When my brother takes
the gun, he squares his body
to the horizon,
right eye bunched around
the viewfinder, squinting hard
into empty miles.
The sky is a wall.
We stuff our ears with paper.
A can bucks and leaps
as my brother stops
the recoil with his body.
A metal ping rings
in the wind. I taste
iron and clay, remember
the child’s game we played:
with coins in our mouths,
we’d travel safe across Styx.
Did we trust the myth?
Empty shells litter
the ground. The shots shrink the space
between here and there,
exceeding the speed
of sound. In sight but beyond
hearing range, semi
trucks barrel across
the plain. The future crouches
small in the distance.
Photo by Mathilde Karrèr
We‘d like to thank Mathilde Karrèr and Marlo Starr once again for their wonderful contributions to The Napkin Poetry Review. Thank you to everyone who has supported us thus far, and we’re so excited to continue sharing the beautiful work from each poet and photographer throughout the coming weeks, both here and on our website launching soon.
Editors comments: The landscapes in this poem are, in Starr’s words, ‘in sight but beyond’. The shooting field is mapped onto the Underworld, the present shifts swiftly into the past then slips into the future as relationships are interrupted. The blurred distinctions between memory and imagination are vertiginous, even provincially magical.