“one more time, with feeling”
When I was nineteen
I stole a gun. The drug dealer
next door, blitzed out
of her skull, didn’t
see me
pull it from her
kitchen cupboard.
As the California sun
sank below the
foothills, I haunted
the neighborhood,
screaming your
doomed name.
I was ready.
A death-wish Romeo
beneath your bedroom
window. Split once
a neighbor threatened
to call the cops.
I never told you this story.
Not because I regret
what I did, was prepared
to do—those forty-five
minutes of havoc, hunting
down your head.
Back then, I wasn’t shit.
Just electrified violence.
All fists, piss & safety pins,
an unwed teenage mother
with no address.
You had parents. Freckles.
A three-story house. I’d listen
to you spit your angsty
fiction while I slept in parks
& ate from garbage cans.
When I learned you were
coveting the man I loved,
I felt my insides darken,
cursed your well-fed
royalty disguised as grit.
Got tired of the forgery,
wanted all the black-eyed
wealth to myself:
BANG, you’re dead.
Wish I could say I’ve put
those days behind me,
that I never fall into
the steel-weight daydream
of a gun’s hard lesson.
1995—half my life ago—still,
every time you call
to bitch about your latest
ex-soulmate or DUI,
one more kid taken
from you by the state
I want to tell you
about the only night
you survived.
When something
said fall asleep
& you did.
Crashed hard
with a starving bitch
& pistol at the ready,
birds still singing
in the half daylight.
I’ll say it here, right now,
one more time, with feeling:
it was the only moment
in this wretched life
a god was on my side.
I notice that this poem is heavily structured around the theme of life choices and how all of the choices that you have made in the past lead to the very moment you are in right now. I think that the poet is also describing this relationship between them and this person they wrote it to, and how she is grateful that she did not do what she thought about doing that night.
🦋 Madeline Pitts 🦋 