Misfire

Terre Haute, Indiana

I confess: The rooster’s dead.
The sky— bloodshot. The dock tilts
on its own axis, eyes leaking gold.
Saturday,

a full blush on
our shoulders, catfish searching
over the edges of our boat. Their scales sharpen themselves.
Our fishhooks: the kickback from a pistol, crumpling the air.

The sky dips into us. The boat’s hull, hollowed by the wind,
cuts like the cleave of a blade through the glassy water.
What I want is for there to be nothing
left in the world to kill, but here it is,

a trout tangled in the net, rising with fault,
a bullet in retrograde, your hands hooking over
mine. The rocks we throw streak a surrender. You behead

a flower while I wring out
the waves. Say I can raise the shoreline, say I can coax
some sun off its ledge to shield us,
the wind a veil, your touch

deepening like a myth.

Emily Pickering is a writer based in Michigan. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Eunoia Review, Farside Review, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, among others. She is from Memphis, Tennessee.