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Henry Kearney, IV

Shotgun Elegy

Poetry from NER 37.3

Even now, wouldn’t it start like that? An empty
plastic milk jug peppered with buckshot
as we learned the art of destruction.
Do not say there is no art in that.
In fact, there is little art that is not
such things. The chaos of oiled colors
adhering to unseen fibers in the canvas,
its purity destroyed and the whole thing
altered like those milk jugs that would jump
and roll down into the cloud of field dust
kicked up behind them. Or the way that chicken
got loose when we were fooling around
in the coop, where we should not have been,
but there we were and it got out and all hell broke loose:
the dogs chasing it all over, Daddy yelling,
and then, finally, when the dogs had the poor thing
cornered it played dead and fooled everybody.

[read more]

Henry Kearney, IV is from Robersonville, North Carolina, and he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College. His work has appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Cortland Review, and the Collagist.

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