Duck Hunt

by Matthew Hollett

I heft the oversized orange pistol,

plug in its umbilical. Pixels flicker,

speakers squawk. A boxy duck

flusters up from the brush.

I trig the trigger, the Zapper zaps

with a sound like a cash register

clipping its toenails. Za-zhring!

In my imagination, a single photon

surges from the muzzle and smashes

into the television, winging pixel-duck

with impeccable precision. For half a second

my quarry is nailed to the sky

by one wild, wide, incredulous eye –

then nosedives. The snickering

sidekick dog who lurks in the marsh

swallows his snark and brandishes

its corpse. A number floating in the sky

ticks up. I snag duck after duck

as brainlessly as Mario bashing a coin block –

Za-zhring! Za-zhring! – not thinking

about it much. An adolescence lapses

before I grasp that the gun works in reverse:

pumping the trigger

pistol-whips an electrical pulse

backwards thru cable into console,

chain-reacting (whether I hit anything or not)

into cataclysm:

every bright atom of sky, grass, shrub, dog

snuffed

minus a white box where a duck was.

The gun is a bleary photodiode

strapped to a detonator. The marsh might as well

be Bikini Atoll. I’ve spent hours

obliterating waterfowl

with the equivalent of a stealth bomber,

oppenheimering a splotch of wetland over and over

with every twitch of my finger.

The nameless dog winks at me,

ducks into his bunker.

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Matthew Hollett is a writer and photographer in St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). His work explores landscape and memory through photography, writing and walking.  Optic Nerve, a collection of poems about photography and visual perception, was published by Brick Books in 2023. It was shortlisted for the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award, and longlisted for the BMO Winterset Award. Matthew won the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize, and has previously received the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers and The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. He is a graduate of the MFA program at NSCAD University.