Fifty Rounds                                                                                                       —Alejandro Escudé


It’s like that at the shooting range.
Silent. The sound of your own hard breathing.
Make no mistake about it, you are scared.
Of what? People with guns. Regular people.
You’re scared of yourself, your own gun.
There’s a paper human five meters away.
You hit it dead on. The head has a hole in it.
Now the heart. The heart. The heart.
You surround the heart with emptiness.
You like the click of the magazine.
You practice shooting after closing the slide,
you practice shooting after cocking the slide.
Everything works. The gun is beautiful in your hands
because a gun listens, a gun obeys.

Alejandro Escude

Alejandro Escudé is the winner of the 2013 Sacramento Poetry Center Award. His first collection, My Earthbound Eye, is now available on Amazon and at www.sacramentopoetrycenter.com. Alejandro is originally from Argentina. He is a high school English teacher and lives in Los Angeles.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2018