Looking through boxes of old photos
I come upon some from when I was
four and five and six.  

My mother and me on a swing in the back garden. 
Neighbor kids from up the street.
A birthday party, nursing a case of the surlies.
In bed, puffed up with mumps.  

Then there’s the dead collection:
me and a record sea bass
me and a stringer of trout
me and a dozen wood pigeons,
me and an handsome brace of woodcock.
Me, at four, with my plastic replica
.20 gauge double-barrel breakaway.
Me at six, with a .12 gauge Winchester pump,
the real thing.  

My father put life and death into my little hands. 
He taught me to shoot.  Steadied me against the first recoil. 
Helped me wring the pheasant’s neck, then spread its wings
in October sunshine so I would drink the beauty of what we’d killed. 
He taught me about quick reflexes and quick reloads, about
coups de grace and appreciation, not exultation.  

We ate it all.  Smoked, potted, fricasseed, canned, jerked,
or fried, there was nothing wanton or wasted in the killing. 
Food from the earth, no different than oats or tomatoes or parsley.  

It was a good learning. When he died, I knew
what he would have said to me at the end, if he had been
at my shoulder.  “See,” he would have said, “it’s just like always. 
First a thing is alive.  Then it’s not.  But it’s still the same thing.

Still a pheasant, still a German Brown…”

Still a father.

Yvette Flaten’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals. She has won awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Writers’ Association.