At the Annie Oakley Festival, There Are So Many Trump 2024 Banners
“I love a gun. I have always loved a gun.” –Annie Oakley
To love a gun the way I love the water
rushing over my shins after a rain
when we’re children again and we’ve plugged
up the sewers. The world was mine,
stuffing old worn towels in every crack.
My mother would turn away,
watch the rain ping
into the water like little stones,
and the higher the water, the more
it reverberated, the more she could feel
it inside her lungs, feel those lungs
fill. To love a gun like water,
to sit down next to the biggest oak tree
on a hot day in June, to put it into your mouth
like a glass of water. To let it fix you.
To love a gun, to think a gun could clean
you or the Earth, could be God’s deluge,
could bring the rainbow back, the white
dove with a branch in beak, the woman
at the well, kneeling and you are there
with your gun and she must give you
whatever it is you’ve come for.
Because you’ve come for something,
because you must want something.
And if I am understanding it as I ought to,
it’s meant to fill you, cleanse you,
keep you, smudge off that smell
of chaos which sits in the bend
of your empty hands in the morning
when they are as neat as a child’s,
as simple and as holy as Abraham’s hands
above every lamb, above every boy,
above every single wife he stood
over like a storm cloud, like a gun.
What does it means to hold this in front
of me, out to me, to hold this up
as an offering to the Lord our God,
as an example of a man with power
so thick it could blow you apart.
