Drive-By

Drive-By

1

Iteration 1: the early years
ca. 1955

The gun shot was not loud,
did not echo back
from the thicket behind
my grandmother's house.

The bullet crashed
through the dining room
window and afterwards
I did not hear a thing,

except:

glass breaking,
my uncle screaming,
the table collapsing
as he fell

and:

the ambulance shrieking
down the street, a patrol car,
tires squealing as it sped away,
my grandmother crying.

The language
had not yet developed,
no term, no phrase
no piece of jargon
to reduce the act
from brother rage
to headline size

And yet, blood spilled onto the carpet,
painted itself into the pattern
of blue on green geometrics, a red spot
that would turn brown, still there,
after forty years.

2

Iteration 2: Cyclo Girl
ca 1967

At a sidewalk cafe
on _doc lap_ street in what
was then Saigon,
they talk about the war,
eat pho and fish
with nuoc mam, spicy
sauce just ten weeks old.

She wears an ao dai, long
flowing dress, sits sidesaddle,
as the law requires, her left hand
on the cowboy's shoulder,
cyclo girl, Honda screaming,
and without aiming, fires three shots.

A routine thing, we practice it,
fall upon the floor,
hands covering heads,
though hands will
never be enough.

The white mice come

and find one man
his head smashed open
brains mixed with pho
and fish sauce.

The cyclo girl is never found
rides through the streets
of urban America
fires shots through windows
speeds away into dark night.

3

Dead Children
ca 1995

They bury them in the same coffin,
cousins on the same day killed,
victims of a spray of bullets
from boys in a slung low Chevrolet--
just ten years old, victims at a party
on their birthday.

But it is easy now. We know
what to say.
We have a word for it
developed after years
of practice. We can reduce it
to a hyphen on the front page.


H. Palmer Hall

Posted over on Palmer's Poems