one more time, with feeling
When I was nineteen
I stole a gun. The drug dealer
next door, blitzed out
of her skull, didn't
see me
pull it from her
kitchen cupboard.
As the California sun
sank below the
foothills, I haunted
the neighborhood,
screaming your
doomed name.
I was ready.
A death-wish Romeo
beneath your bedroom
window. Split once
a neighbor threatened
to call the cops.
I never told you this story.
Not because I regret
what I did, was prepared
to do—those forty-five
minutes of havoc, hunting
down your head.
Back then, I wasn't shit.
Just electrified violence.
All fists, piss & safety pins,
an unwed teenage mother
with no address.
You had parents. Freckles.
A three-story house. I'd listen
to you spit your angsty
fiction while I slept in parks
& ate from garbage cans.
When I learned you were
coveting the man I loved,
I felt my insides darken,
cursed your well-fed
royalty disguised as grit.
Got tired of the forgery,
wanted all the black-eyed
wealth to myself:
BANG, you're dead.
Wish I could say I've put
those days behind me,
that I never fall into
the steel-weight daydream
of a gun's hard lesson.
1995—half my life ago—still,
every time you call
to bitch about your latest
ex-soulmate or DUI,
one more kid taken
from you by the state
I want to tell you
about the only night
you survived.
When something
said fall asleep
& you did.
Crashed hard
with a starving bitch
& pistol at the ready,
birds still singing
in the half daylight.
I'll say it here, right now,
one more time, with feeling:
it was the only moment
in this wretched life
a god was on my side.
Copyright Credit: Rachel McKibbens, "one more time, with feeling" from blud. Copyright © 2017 by Rachel McKibbens. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
Source: blud (2017)