Ilan Mochari

My girlfriend asked

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

If I owned a gun while I was washing dishes at the sink. You might’ve asked too if on your boyfriend’s kitchen shelf beside The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds you saw a paperback called Guns, which traced gunpowder to a 13th-century monk, catalogued the flared muzzle of the blunderbuss, illustrated Colt’s rotating cylinder, and hallowed the birth of 9mm cartridges and canonical assault rifles.

Here’s the thing, I replied. Guns help me write. It helps me compare .22-caliber bullets to slick mini lipsticks, describe how a criminal holsters her .357 Magnum with the pearled pinkish handle whose nacre refracts the overhead fluorescents in a windowless interrogation room. 

It’s an Audubon Guide, not an Osprey. 

I suppose now you’ll ask if I own a bird?

Ilan Mochari is the author of the novel ZINKSY THE OBSCURE. His prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Review, Salamander, Hobart, The Louisville Review, The Minnesota Review, J Journal, Juked, Valparaiso Fiction Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, as well as the Derringer Award, and he is the recipient of a Literature Artist Fellowship grant from the Somerville Arts Council.