reading: "Insult to Injury"

[zirconium]

This poem appears in George Bilgere's 2024 chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, and also online at Rattle.com. The narrator, a man in his sixties, comes across the air gun he used to shoot at cans when he was a teen, and tries it out on "a volume of poetry, slim,/ but not slim enough,/ by a poet I never liked":

The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two

... at which point I cackled at the savagery and decided to post about it here.