Brian Turner

Nearby, an old woman cradles her grandson, whispering, rocking him on her knees as though singing him to sleep, her hands wet with their blood, her black dress soaked in it as her legs give out and she buckles with him to the ground.

If you'd asked her 40 years earlier if she could see herself, an old woman, begging by the roadside for money, here, with a bomb exploding at the market among all these people, she'd have said, to have your heart broken one last time before dying, to kiss a child given sight of a life you could never live, it's impossible.

This isn't the way we die.

This is called Here Bullet.

If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh.

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta's open valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap.

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood.

And I dare you to finish what you've started, because here, bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring, hissing through the air.

Here is where I moan the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have inside of me.

Each twist of the round spun deeper, because here, bullet, here's where the world ends every time.

It's a bizarre poem.

I still struggle with it.

I guess what I mean by that is I'm still learning from my own poem, because I guess that echoes Frost's maxim to, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader, no surprise in the writer, and so on.

But this poem, the beginning of it,

I wrote this poem listening to Queens of the Stone Age, and I was in Mosul in northern Iraq.

It was 2004, and we were back at the base, and I wrote it.

It's one of the quickest poems I've ever written, about 10 or 15 minutes.

And I've told this story many times, but I folded it up, put it in a Ziploc bag, and carried it in my chest pocket the rest of the time that I was in country.

But it's actually one of the longest poems it's ever taken me to write.

And I didn't realize this because I told that first part of the story for several years or a couple years.