WEBVTT

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This is called, "You
and the Raw Bullets."

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I kept having this weird image.

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I was listening
to NPR, and I just

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kept having this image of these
bullets entering my mouth.

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And a lot of these poems
are thinking about how--

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they start at the age of
12, from the first time

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I'm cat-called, forward.

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So it's just sort
of a meditation

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on my own sexual
development and what

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I had been told
externally about what

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it meant to have a female body.

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"You and the Raw Bullets."

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Why the image just now, of
a bullet entering the mouth?

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Why call it raw, when it
isn't sticky and pink,

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like a turkey meatball,
just the usual gold

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and shiny and cylindrical?

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What about this
bullet is uncooked?

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Why does it multiply with you in
parka or short skirt, versions

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of the you that you
were, swallowing

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raw bullets as you walked?

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The images come without
assailant, without gun.

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Just the holes the
bullets opened, the holes

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through which they went.

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And now, at the age
in which you ride

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enclosed in glass, like
the Pope or president,

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you are spitting up the
bullets, slow-simmered

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in your own juices.

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You are shitting
them out, feeling

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them drop from you
in clumps of blood,

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in the days of bleeding left.

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But you cannot
expel all of them.

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Some, raw as the
day they entered,

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have expanded their mushroom
heads into the flesh

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or lodged their hot tip into
the taste center of the brain.

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Will the tongue's
first encounter

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with pomegranate seeds
be forever a lost Eden?

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That fruit of your girlhood
which, also meaning grenade,

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was perhaps never innocent?

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Do your own raw bullets come
back to you, my friends?

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Let us legislate the
active voice instead.

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Not many bodies have been
used as blanks, aluminum cans,

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but here are the men
who pulled the trigger.

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Look at them.

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