Shotgun (Round 2)

Let's workshop this poem about a child's disorienting but world-expanding hunting trip with his father and a group of fawns' disorienting but world-expanding trip across a human road with their mother

---

Shotgun 

Surreal it felt as a kid wrenched 
from dreams in the predawn dark, 
thrown into a severed sequence:
dressing myself beneath spurs
repeated at daytime decibel 
until the tying of my boots fell
to hands of practiced urgency;
finally left to submerge again,
enwombed by the rocking cradle
(the white whoosh of warmth
steadfast from dashboard vents);
only to find myself compelled 
to trudge, on my own power,
through frigid woods quiet 
but for the crunch of our steps—
my father’s Styrofoam coffee,
protected in its feeble warmth  
as if everything depended on it,
between gloves of orange 
muted in the faint glow of gray. 

That sudden sense of a stretch
in what a day might involve,
that sudden sense of expansion
in reality (and that its shaping fell
not just to third-person agency),
must swell in its own way as well
in the young of various species.
Did it swell in the shaky fawns
we hawkeyed from our overlook
that dawn—lit up by headlights
blazing past with Doppler wakes
as they shook along human road,
I imagine, never before beheld?
Did it swell as their erect mother—
suddenly alien to them, I imagine,
in her high-strung pulse of heart—
nudged them (likely with bleats
tinged with ear-twitch cortisol)
to cross with her through fear
to the hill where we lurked?

---

This piece is unpublished