Shooting Your Luck

When Lucky is telling
whoever is on the other end of the phone
about shooting a mocking bird

I think of Harper Lee, naturally,
and then those unknown birds in a nest
with my own BB gun.

I would have been younger,
but that’s no excuse, and I recall clearly
the sun shining

though now I’ve mentioned it
I also seem to remember another time
in the woods near my home,

a young adult, and again
carving her name in my upper arm
like the other when just eleven.

Yet the only mortality here
are those past deaths, then the two scars,
one a misspelling, now disappeared.