Poetry from NER 42.1 (2021)
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but a 400-pound pistol in the bed
of a pickup, welded together from 
scrapyard metal & stamped with names 
of kids shot & killed near the artist’s home. 
Except for all the feathers, dyed 
cotton-candy blue & affixed across 
its cylinder & grip, wrapping the length
of the barrel with a flourish like a boa 
entwining a neck, it might seem like 
any other oversized gun. Conversation 
Piece, he called it, although the feathers 
came later, only after he’d begun driving 
south with a plan to haul the sculpture 
from Chicago to Atlanta, then back 
through Charleston & Sandy Hook. 
But when he stopped for gas the first time,
he knew his art had failed when a man 
sprinted across the parking lot to say 
Goddamn, that’s one badass gun.
Something needed to change. Maybe 
the feathers could turn the pistol into 
a thing you approached with a question 
instead of praise. And if the plumes
now covered some of the names, burying
the elegies hammered into metal, 
what choice did he have but to continue
driving through town after town, listening
to the wind’s song whipping across
the wide mouth of the barrel, tending
to the gun now & then from a sack 
of feathers he kept in the back seat to use 
whenever storms lashed things loose?