
Justin Hunt
Terry: 1950 – 1970
You were the shy, gentle boy—the classmate
dealt a low-bid hand: speech impediment twisting
thin lips, a heart inflamed, rheumatic-fevered
somewhere on your family's sandy ground southwest
of town, that wind-eared knoll where your mother
stayed up nights to hold you, keep you warm.
January blazed clear and cold the day we came out
for your seventh birthday. We ate cake, drank milk
and played games, then followed your father outside,
where he lent us each a .22 and strung us along frozen
roads to hunt—the instinct that had passed you over,
nothing more sideways to your grain than killing.
The rest of us stalked, your wild-haired brothers too,
something tugging our breath, something to prove.
You must have flinched when Keith Halsey whirled,
fired into the snow-filled ditch and pulled from icy weeds
a rabbit, blood dripping from its shattered head,
dotting the sea of white over which our small bodies
bobbed and trailed. If some fate-tracker had followed
us then, read our snow-prints and called out names
in order of deaths-to-be, we wouldn’t have been surprised
to hear yours first. For you were the marked one,
the quiet kid who picked fruit out at Murphy’s Orchard
with an eye for the unblemished, a caution of numbers,
a need to get things right. The rest of us squandered
our time, threw rotten apples at each other, though never
at you. For you were apart with your sweet brittle,
the shadow that crept along your smile, the ‘56 Buick
convertible you saved up for and painted sky blue,
top cranked down for the Alva girl people said you loved.
And when I heard your heart had quit on you, I already
knew. For you were the spirit who rounded our edges,
our well of early conscience, the boy we never once teased
hauled back to Kansas and buried over in Barber County—
down on the Oklahoma line, in the red gypsum dirt.
Finalist, Knightville Poetry Contest, 2017
Published in The New Guard Literary Review, Vol. VII, 2018