FINAL POEM FOR THE BULLET

When the bullets overhead ricocheted

off the metal fence and junk cars grave-

stoning the junkyard, and when my uncle

shouted for me and my friend to duck

beneath the torrent of lead zip-lining

the air from an unseen source,

and when screams scratched throats keenly

till echoing the bullet din approaching no target

with aim or intention precise enough to reach

anyone but the innocent, and when my legs

refused to unfold from beneath me to follow

friend and uncle through the gangway

of a neighbor’s house until being alone

was more frightening than hot shells

finding all the ways to smolder through, and when

my brutal desire to live led me to safety

acquired in an alley where rat corpses perfumed

away gun smoke of which I’d grown nostalgic,

and when laughter broke from our lungs

as if surviving didn’t mean tomorrow’s fury

could second-chance us toward alternative deaths,

and when I look back within myself at the pleasure

fear made possible, and when my ten-year-old breeziness

degraded to damn, we alive and the piss-sprayed,

Colt .45, crackpipe-laden alley corroborated

echoes of my voice in the climate of what tried

to kill us—the weather itself cracking its neck

into thunder until an hour’s dismantling

manifested a system of continuous reckoning

with the possibilities of every broken bottle

mirroring my prostration’s erotics. And if when

I think back to that alley leading to an empty

lot where a house of addictions once laughed

from glassless windows, if I render this re-

memory to reclaim that bullet-lost child, and if

I find him glistening like a just-born species,

wearing the eyes of my mother and the lips

of my father, holding a sword in one hand

and a scale in the other, counting backward

from ten, as when in the hollow of a nightmare

the nightmare’s attendee suspects zero’s nothing

brings back the world the nightmare fed from,

as if at the end of the end was a lesson,

as if at the end of the end was a form?

“Ne Me Quitte Pas”: I Put a Spell on You: Nina Simone: 1965