This is called, "You and the Raw Bullets."
I kept having this weird image.
I was listening to NPR, and I just
kept having this image of these bullets entering my mouth.
And a lot of these poems are thinking about how--
they start at the age of 12, from the first time
I'm cat-called, forward.
So it's just sort of a meditation
on my own sexual development and what
I had been told externally about what
it meant to have a female body.
"You and the Raw Bullets."
Why the image just now, of a bullet entering the mouth?
Why call it raw, when it isn't sticky and pink,
like a turkey meatball, just the usual gold
and shiny and cylindrical?
What about this bullet is uncooked?
Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions
of the you that you were, swallowing
raw bullets as you walked?
The images come without assailant, without gun.
Just the holes the bullets opened, the holes
through which they went.
And now, at the age in which you ride
enclosed in glass, like the Pope or president,
you are spitting up the bullets, slow-simmered
in your own juices.
You are shitting them out, feeling
them drop from you in clumps of blood,
in the days of bleeding left.
But you cannot expel all of them.
Some, raw as the day they entered,
have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh
or lodged their hot tip into the taste center of the brain.
Will the tongue's first encounter
with pomegranate seeds be forever a lost Eden?
That fruit of your girlhood which, also meaning grenade,
was perhaps never innocent?
Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my friends?
Let us legislate the active voice instead.
Not many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans,
but here are the men who pulled the trigger.
Look at them.