Our parents collected decoys, artisan ducks they displayed on the divider between kitchen and living room, where we measured our heights. Decoys on the mantel, in a glass case meant for china. Donations to Ducks Unlimited brought commemorative duck art to the walls, and, of course, they hunted duck. An arsenal of game equipment at home and at their cottage. The guns my brother used to shoot raccoons and possums through the bathroom window. Sometimes it was a cat. We did not live in the country. Out back by the sunflowers is the pet cemetery, and in the lilac grove, the secret cemetery where his mother buried the cats and small dogs he killed and brought home, people’s pets. The decoys faced the same direction unless someone dusted them or picked one up to admire. That wrong-way duck always set my brother off. He’d take a gun to the pond and kill the first duck that turned a different way.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s “Dabblers and Divers” appears in Flock 23: Kith & Kin.
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Our parents collected decoys, artisan ducks they displayed on the divider between kitchen and living room, where we measured our heights. Decoys on the mantel, in a glass case meant for china. Donations to Ducks Unlimited brought commemorative duck art to the walls, and, of course, they hunted duck. An arsenal of game equipment at home and at their cottage. The guns my brother used to shoot raccoons and possums through the bathroom window. Sometimes it was a cat. We did not live in the country. Out back by the sunflowers is the pet cemetery, and in the lilac grove, the secret cemetery where his mother buried the cats and small dogs he killed and brought home, people’s pets. The decoys faced the same direction unless someone dusted them or picked one up to admire. That wrong-way duck always set my brother off. He’d take a gun to the pond and kill the first duck that turned a different way.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s “Dabblers and Divers” appears in Flock 23: Kith & Kin.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s most recent book “Art Speaks” is an ekphrastic one with painter Mary Hatch. She has at least eight books of poems and short prose, and her work is published widely. Currently she is involved in The Photosynthesis Project, which is hard to explain but she has written an eighty page illustrated book to try. She was the 2017 Community Medal of the Arts winner.