Editor’s Choice Award: Robert Fillman

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). Individual poems have appeared in such venues as The Hollins Critic, Poetry East, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. His criticism has been published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, CLAJ: The College Language Association Journal, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University and currently teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.

ON A TUESDAY, MY SON AND I ARE SCREAMING

down Splash Mountain at Disney, twelve hundred miles
removed from another mass shooting, this one
at an elementary school in Texas,

though we don’t know about it yet. Ours are screams
of laughter, water spraying in our faces,
which shields us from the midday sun as our flume

steers around minor dangers, bumps the edges
of darkened tunnels, past whimsical vignettes
of cartoon animals, the kind you might spy

in a fourth-grade classroom. We are powerless,
unable to exit, our stomachs turning
with each unexpected drop. But we chose this

terror, and it shows in the ride photograph:
my son’s eyes closed, his arms waving in the air,
a boy just looking happy to be alive.

Shotgun Willie

Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear
Bitin’ on a bullet and pullin’ out all of his hair.
Shotgun Willie’s got all of his family there.
                      — Willie Nelson, “Shotgun Willie”

I can see him plunk down
the needle, cigarette
cradled between his lips,
hear the scratch and wobble
of the record before
those first slack country chords
of “Shotgun Willie” rang
from his Technics speakers,
the volume knob losing
the quarrel with his fist,
can of Schmidt’s beer pulsing
on the floor, the whole room
wagging with the sweet tang
of summer sweat as he
swayed, a long-haired outlaw
singer, his stubbled chin
nodding behind the beat,
that turquoise wife-beater
and muscles tapping and
bopping one of Mom’s end
tables like bongos, when
the blue steel of his eyes
unloads a six-string smile
in my direction, that
look tunneling through me
this morning as I wake,
along with this strange tune
that I hadn’t thought of
in more than thirty years
as if rising from some
chamber of the soul and
suddenly I want to
shoot the breeze with my dad,
hum along with a song
I hated as a kid.