“anger is an energy” — Public Image Ltd.

This is urgent. This poetic justice
concealed in the long gun’s long chamber.

I’ll turn to you since the peaceful chorus
rarely makes good Peace Keepers. This anger

turns us passive witness. Always after
our wars do we even hear a poet

condemn our bloodshed; a general slur
against violence. But this poem? I cut

it on a bullet and put the bullet
in the chamber; it’s a rhyme against bad

behavior. Now, goddess of the sonnet
and the bullet, Athena of the mad

blood, speak through this round black-eyed deterrent.
Help me cock this back. This is urgent.

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I wrote that poem back in 2008, back when there were still national conversations going on about the merits of gun-control and closing down Guantanamo and bring our troops back home. I don’t know what happened to the Anti-War crowd, perhaps the debacle that turned into Occupy Wall Street depressed them so much they went home or perhaps their trust-funds ran out and they were required to get 9 to 5 jobs to support their patchouli habits and SUVs (just kidding guys, you know I love you). Whatever the case, the dialogues about the state of our nation seem to be missing (or perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places, that happens too) which is sad since none of the issues have changed. We are, for example, still a nation that loves using guns. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “in 2010, there were 19,392 firearm-related suicide deaths, and 11,078 firearm-related homicide deaths in the United States.” According to a report by Heninger and Hanzlick, (2008) a “study of non-natural deaths in a large American city between 2007-08 revealed that half of such deaths in persons from 10 to 19 years of age were due to homicide, and firearms were involved in 88% of them.” I don’t know who Heninger and Hanzlick are, nor do they name the city, but regardless, the issue of gun violence is not going to go away in my lifetime, perhaps ever, at all.

I don’t own a gun, nor will I ever. I say that knowing it doesn’t take a lot of morals or energy or cojones to not own something. I also don’t own a factory that uses child labor to make Martha Stewart products either, but that doesn’t make me a virtuous person. In the same way, writing a poem about gun violence doesn’t actually stop people from killing each other. But it does have the potential to change minds, change attitudes, change whole ways of thinking. All art has that potential, poetry is no exception. And yet, having said that, there are so few well-written poems about the pros and the cons of guns. I am not sure why this is, since the current batch of poets living and writing today excel at writing about other things — broken hearts, failed relationships, their terrible life choices when dating — and yet somehow because the subject is about guns poets seem shy to touch the issue. How odd.

I saw the poet Rita Dove perform back in 2004, at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Her book, American Smooth, had just come out and she read Meditation at Fifty Yards. It blew my mind. When she got to the line, “one incandescent/ fingertip,” she traced a straight line in the air and it seemed to me like the pathway glowed. But it was the last section, where the bullet is given voice, that is the power of the poem. “O aperture O light straight is my verb I am flame velocity O beautiful body I am coming,” she read each line faster and faster and I found myself weeping in the audience, as I do when something I do not understand, something bigger than myself, touches me.

I know it is possible to have a conversation about gun control and gun violence. We tend to get caught up in soundbite quotes, which reduces complex issues into simple black and white ones. That does neither side any favors. Poetry can side-step that problem. It can bring a voice to a subject that is, for many people, taboo. Simply wishing for guns to go away solves nothing, likewise, ignoring the violence that guns bring to our communities is shameful. When the poets start tackling this issue that is when our national dialogue will start once more.

The art I used for this post came from simply googling the term “gays with guns.” Some of the images are a little more obscure. The first is from the anime Bakuretsu Tenshi (Burst Angel, in English), the second was an actual pink tank used during a Pro-Gay Marriage rally, the third from the website Pink Pistols (with a whole catalog of “femme pistols”), and last is Sean Connery in his, “red nappy, knee-high leather boots, pony tail and Zapata moustache” from the 1974 movie Zardoz. As with everything I do, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target

— by Rita Dove

Safety First.

Never point your weapon, keep your finger
off the trigger. Assume a loaded barrel
even when it isn’t, especially when you know it isn’t.
Glocks are lightweight but sensitive;
the Keltec has a long pull and a kick.
Rifles have penetrating power, viz.:
if the projectile doesn’t lodge in its mark,
it will travel some distance
until it finds shelter; it will certainly
pierce your ordinary drywall partition.
You could wound the burglar and kill your child
sleeping in the next room, all with one shot.

Open Air.

Fear, of course. Then the sudden
pleasure of heft—as if the hand
has always yearned for this solemn
fit, this gravitas, and now had found
its true repose.

Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it—
squeeze between heartbeats.
Look down the sights. Don’t
hold your breath. Don’t hold
anything, just stop breathing.
Level the scene with your eyes. Listen
Soft, now: squeeze.

Gender Politics.

Guys like noise: rapid fire,
think-and-slide of a blunt-nose sliver Mossberg,
or double-handed Colts, slugging it out from the hips.
Rambo or cowboy, they’ll whoop it up.

Women are fewer, more elegant.
They prefer precision:
tin cans swing-dancing in the trees,
the paper bull’s-eye’s tidy rupture at fifty yards.

(Question: If you were being pursued,
how would you prefer to go down—
ripped through a blanket of fire
or plucked by one incandescent
fingertip?)

The Bullet.

dark dark no wind no heaven
i am not anything not borne on air i bear
myself I can slice the air no wind
can hold me let me let me
go i can see yes
o aperture o light let me off
go off straight is my verb straight
my glory road yes now i can feel
it the light i am flame velocity o
beautiful body i am coming i am yours
before you know it
i am home