Club Icarus

Ballistics

3 Ballistics That the greasy pop-pop of a semiautomatic wrecks the air before I can get off the couch, before my wife yanks our baby daughter from the new fallen flesh of pomegranate and runs inside before their car horrors past our fence is true. That this winter this town has more bullets than rain gutters in truth but is not true. But the bullets are true. Candles, rosaries, the roses that shrine the street corner are true beyond the next day stare of faces watching me walk behind a stroller. What’s true is the wound channel, that human tissue jumps from a bullet like water from a diver. One boy bled out where he fell The other on a table at a university hospital. Drawn blinds are true, checked locks. Smiles have too much teeth to be true. What’s vital is the crush mechanism, the permanent hole a bullet makes in that moment I’m watching 4 my wife and child each time they fail to reach the door. Noises at night grow skin, grow fur, spring fangs that scratch and score casement glass and hinge between what’s true. And what isn’t? That I wrote down the names of the dead, though it should be. What’s real are the costs of moving, of staying, the recoil from a too early doorbell, the ten to fifteen seconds left to a body when the heart’s instantly destroyed. What’s left is our fence five feet from the street, the house thirty feet from the fence, the front wall four inches of California bungalow and then her crib. ...