W. Scott Hanna
W. Scott Hanna is a Professor of English at West Liberty University where he teaches creative writing and literature. His poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Cleaver Magazine, Still: The Journal, and others, as well as in the anthologies Riparian: An Anthology of Ohio River Writing, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has served as the poetry editor of the Northern Appalachia Review since its inaugural volume in 2020 to the present. He lives in St. Clairsville, Ohio with his wife, two children, and two dogs.
Grackle
Our mother told us it was okay to kill
when we were boys in summer,
no other birds but the Grackles
that would gather and cackle
in the trees behind the only house on the left
because they poached nests and stole food
from the innocent wren or robin, so it was okay
to aim and fire a pellet gun at a living thing,
to end a life deliberately,
to turn something living dead.
We could hear their awful cackle and squawk
high in the locusts in the woods behind the house,
nothing like the melody of Cardinal or Finch
or the occasional Blue Bird or Gross Beak
who would all scatter from the feeders
as a Grackle approached to then eat its glut,
so we hunted for their purple heads,
shiny and glistening even against a grey March sky,
until one summer day we picked one off from a branch,
and it fell to the ground, flopped and flapped until dead.
My big brother carried our kill to a rock in the woods
and, as if a post-mortem punishment for poaching,
dropped a ten pound rock on its splayed body
again and again until the entrails spilled out
and I’d seen the insides of a life for the first time,
but even in the glob of guts on the rock
I could still see its marble glass black eye
staring skyward into a future of nothing,
its glossy purple head, so dark, so beautiful now,
and I felt for sure someone, or something,
there in the whispering wind through leaves,
with grave disappointment, witnessing.
