At The Shooting Range
Casings clink underfoot like tiny bells.
They are everywhere. 
To think something so hollow could kill a person without a guess. 

We shout into the wind. It is bitter. It passes through us and our voices 
don’t make it very far. There is no mercy here.

There are no seats except to level your gun sights. They have been frozen for weeks.
The whole of the valley spreads itself out for us like a girl, her arms gangly, nipples hard as ice and bright in the distance. Cars on the highway don’t know that we can stop them with our bodies. This year has grown long faced and I sit with my keys that forget where they could be useful. Or maybe I forget how to use them, but there are no locks. There is only the warm belly of the car that brought us here. Cardboard cut-outs step into the breeze and fall away. As drunk as we are, it’s easy to put a hole in their hearts. So here we say our goodbyes to a year. There is so much not to remember.
The horoscope says there is peace in my heart tomorrow. Now it is an empty bottle, pieces
of other people’s lives stuck to the bottom. Tomorrow it says I will glow, today nothing. There is no seat for mercy here. I keep stepping on bullets that have spent their voices to shout across a distance and find some thing to tear through. I keep falling down onto these legs. I have stared onto the lights of these towns in a brisk sweep of fog, thrown rocks at the power lines: Listen, there is so much left to forget. This year
has traveled like a sinking ship. I sit, and no locks open. It’s so easy to shiver.
No end is in sight. Tomorrow will already be glassed. There’s no seat. No mercy. Some birds fly still in circles through the crystal sky. Bullet shells remember when their bodies weren’t so hollow. This long year divided into hours would never end. It rests in an excessively large room peopled by disaster, by birth: two brothers who sit at a table and talk quietly. Their conversation passes from one end to the other. Some birds still spread their wings in these freezing winds. There is no seat, no mercy here. Just shells that have wandered too far from the ocean, spent casings that forgot what made up their echo. Listen, my heart is not a circle circle circle circle
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