Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting
It was cold. It was raining. I was tired.
I cried ‘Pull!’ and tightened, tried to follow the whirring discus
to its apex, the point at which it would pause and begin its fall;
my eye filled with dark mountain,
the grey curve of two heron
sweeping back along the silver loch,
and the shotgun was an extension
of my ability to crush the world
in gunpowder and brass, and the recoil
went deeper than the soft socket of my shoulder.
‘Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting’© Samuel Tongue. First published in Magma #55 (2013). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
It was cold. It was raining. I was tired.
I cried ‘Pull!’ and tightened, tried to follow the whirring discus
to its apex, the point at which it would pause and begin its fall;
my eye filled with dark mountain,
the grey curve of two heron
sweeping back along the silver loch,
and the shotgun was an extension
of my ability to crush the world
in gunpowder and brass, and the recoil
went deeper than the soft socket of my shoulder.
‘Why I was so bad at clay-pigeon shooting’© Samuel Tongue. First published in Magma #55 (2013). Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
