The Shotgun Shell
In my desk drawer
there’s a shotgun shell
I’ve kept for sixty years.
Brass based,
red paper cased,
seven and a half shot
twelve gauge
Federal
for dove and quail.
There’s still the faintest
salt smoke scent of powder in it
if I hold it close
up to my nose.
I’d gather them by the sacksful
in late autumn
along the field roads
between the vineyards
after the season had
come to a close.
I don’t know why I kept it.
Maybe the smell takes me back
to some place safe enough
but mysterious,
like the sound of the ocean
in an old sea shell.
______________
Keith Hansen
Review by Zeke Sanchez
“The Shotgun Shell” by Keith Hansen brings me back to something I myself have experienced, which probably means that in different ways, many of us have also experienced it – which is a roundabout way of saying the poem has something universal about it. It has something to do with the lines “I don’t know why I kept it. Maybe the smell takes me back”. He says he would gather up the shotgun shells by the sacksful after hunting season, but he kept this one. Just a reminder. Kind of like you keep a certain memory of a hill or mountain you once climbed, or an auburn-haired girl you once saw, or of your first rain shower in the Deep South. Something special. For me, the poem, though it is of something tangible and not uncommon, is special enough.
Review by Dave Mehler
This is an amazing poem in its own right, but it is especially delicious to read it as a response to a poem by Barbara Drake, called “The Lipstick,” from her book, Driving One Hundred. No one would ever put this together that he was riffing off a poem by Drake but me, because when I shared the poem with him, he wrote this. Hers from a feminine point of view, but his entirely masculine, about a similarly sized object, and yet his own. It’s nearly ekphrastic.
Review by Paul Jones
A shotgun shell rediscovered is the trigger for memory, a deadly Madeline but no less sweet. The closure, perfect for this poem, opens up like the ocean heard, by audio illusion, in an old shell of another kind.