Gun Control: a Triptych
       

I.

When the older brother, horsing around, opened fire
with the 12-gauge and shot his little brother in the back,
my Aunt Anna pressed her open

hand over the wound, over the blown right lung.
Blood stuttered up
through her fingers. As he began to slide away,
she kept
her hand flat-hard against that death.
At Emergency, they had to pry

it away. He survived that night.
When he takes his shirt off today, at the lake,
you can see the bleach-white stretch where
no hair grows and the skin thins to
her imprint-a hand—span—just under his shoulder.
Where a wing, if we had wings, might begin to unfurl.

2.

Blood hour. Hour of the startled bird
brought down in a field of first thoughts.
Trigger-quick. You can't know another mind,

but a teacher's job is showing each one how
to remake fate: fluttering up from the nest in
sudden flight. She prints each name in chalk:

each kid waves a wand. Bubbles! Faces
afloat in prisms. Then the one All-Fate, in-
escapable, exploding: camouflage figure, rifle.

Shouting into the room, his shouting mouth.
She has always believed that each soul
confronts the Unknown alone. Now she

sees It loaded, facing her. She calls out their
names, but their cries rise like birdcall, then
descend, one by one. What she's always loved:

their names. And it is almost Story Time, she
dreams, dying. The story today is Blood Hour.

3.

Some say it's High Noon in a big hat, shooting
up the saloon. America? Some say it's your

Second Amendment, those stockpiles of ammo
bought at a chain. Or the next-door kid living in

screen games: exploding heads, walking dead?
Or it's gangs in torched neighborhoods, drugs

running in the brain or a bead drawn on a clinic
doctor, women in line next to a homeless vet,

begging. Some say it's armed revolt, racist cops,
bragging hunters, looter-tools, mass crave/rave

for oblivion: Rapture addicts! Here comes one
more drive-by, school invasion, nightclub terror,

bully/bullied, lynch mob, god cult, toddler-a-cide.
O America, shooting from the hip, from the last of

the trees in a national park, your militia surrounded
by SWAT. Say you're an upstanding patriot in an

invented war—defending unborn lobbyists, a double-
sided coin minted by the National Reprisal Association

of the craven congressionals—saying it to history's
final judge. You, great god Gun, in whom some trust:

in bunker-mind, underground condos. O say it in Homeric
chanted dactyls: I sing of arms & the punk self-pumped-

up lovers of the Silencer. Dickinson wrote it first,
living god of Gun, you are "without the power to die.".

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Copyright © 2018 Carol Muske-Dukes All rights reserved
from Blue Rose
Penguin Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission