The Week Before Christmas — Blackbird Archive

← v20n2, Fall 2021

When my wife was finally able to tell our son

we would separate, he told her where I would hide

the deer rifle, a dinged-up Marlin, sold from

the trunk of a car by a house painter. My son

would watch me, after hunting each season ending

at the New Year, oil the receiver and its walnut stock

over a drop cloth, then climb the steep ladder

to the loft where I would lay across the joists

its horse-blanket case, and where, over one more season,

dust would settle upon it, the rifle he had taken

from me, although suicide would not enter our family

again, like a stranger at a block party,

his untoward, lowered voice and reeking breath,

that hiss of confession in mixed company, that a deer

pitched down with one shot will sound just like

a bundled square of roofing shingles thrown to the ground at dusk.

marriage family grief

Kevin Cantwell

Kevin Cantwell’s poems have appeared in such places as The New Republic , Poetry , Metre , Commonweal , and The Paris Review . One of his poems was reprinted in The Paris Review Book: of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953 (Picador, 2003). He edits the RedBone Chapbooks series, which publishes an occasional collection by a Georgia poet who has not yet published a first book. He is the author of two books of poetry, One of Those Russian Novels (What Books Press, 2009) and Something Black in the Green Part of Your Eye (New Issues Prose & Poetry, 2002). He has won the Academy of American Poets Prize, the River City Poetry Award (twice), a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, and the Agnes Scott Award for Poetry. He is a professor of English at Macon State College in Georgia.