How a bullet must feel

—after Ross Gay, up to Sean Bell

To be slapped at the nape of your neck, so hard,

that you steel to instant paralysis from shock, go

beyond how the architect and artisan of bullet-body-

making pushed the shell of your body to obstruction,

like nailing down the feet in crucifixion, then sludge-

hammering the back of the head into supersonic space,

where a body goes supernova, hot to touch, and the shell,

that skin of clothes you once wore, sizzles to the ground,

bouncing element hotfooting on the sun’s orange surface;

but the body, the body still fights gravity, so grand to

sooth its red hot skinless frame, to think about restoration,

mid-flight, before entering the mettle of a real bystander—

to be desecrated before becoming author to desecration—

interrupting a fiancée’s feral laughter, discombobulating

itself from the rupture of a thought that always explodes

into the black art of blackness, and then stops all sound.