USA

Here, Bullet 

If a body is what you want, 

then here is bone and gristle and flesh. 

Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, 

the aorta’s opened valves, the leap 

thought makes at the synaptic gap. 

Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, 

that inexorable flight, that insane puncture 

into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish 

what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet, 

here is where I complete the word you bring 

hissing through the air, here is where I moan 

the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering 

my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have 

inside of me, each twist of the round 

spun deeper, because here, Bullet, 

here is where the world ends, every time. 

Eulogy

It happens on a Monday, at 11:20 a.m., 

as tower guards eat sandwiches 

and seagulls drift by on the Tigris river. 

Prisoners tilt their heads to the west 

though burlap sacks and duct tape blind them. 

The sound reverberates down concertina coils 

the way piano wire thrums when given slack. 

And it happens like this, on a blue day of sun, 

when Private Miller pulls the trigger 

to take brass and fire into his mouth: 

the sound lifts the birds up off the water, 

a mongoose pauses under the orange trees, 

and nothing can stop it now, no matter what 

blur of motion surrounds him, no matter what voices 

crackle over the radio in static confusion, 

because if only for this moment the earth is stilled, 

and Private Miller has found what low hush there is 

down in the eucalyptus shade, there by the river. 




PFC B. Miller 

(1980-March 22, 2004) 

Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief 
for Sin-lege-unninni 

In the month of Ab, late summer 

of the seventh century B.C.E., a poet 

chisels text into stone tablets, etching 

three thousand lines and brushing them by hand, 

the dust blown off with a whispered breath. 



He is translating the old Sumerian epic, 

reinventing the city of Uruk, the Wild Man 

and the woman sent out to seduce him. 

It is an old story now. It was an old story then, 

full of gods and beasts and the inevitable 

points of no return each age must learn. 



In the mid-August heat of the year 2004, 

an archaeologist pauses over an outline 

of bone, one body’s signature in the earth, 

which he reads carefully with a camelhair brush 

and patience, each hairline fracture revealing. 



History is a cloudy mirror made of dirt 

and bone and ruin. And love? Loss? 

These are the questions we must answer 

by war and famine and pestilence, and again 

by touch and kiss, because each age must learn 

This is the path of the sun’s journey by night. 

Night In Blue 

At seven thousand feet and looking back, running lights 

blacked out under the wings and America waiting, 

a year of my life disappears at midnight, 

the sky a deep viridian, the houselights below 

small as match heads burned down to embers. 



Has this year made me a better lover? 

Will I understand something of hardship, 

of loss, will a lover sense this 

in my kiss or touch? What do I know 

of redemption or sacrifice, what will I have 

to say of the dead—that it was worth it, 

that any of it made sense? 

I have no words to speak of war. 

I never dug the graves in Talafar. 

I never held the mother crying in Ramadi. 

I never lifted my friend’s body 

when they carried him home. 



I have only the shadows under the leaves 

to take with me, the quiet of the desert, 

the low fog of Balad, orange groves 

with ice forming on the rinds of fruit. 

I have a woman crying in my ear 

late at night when the stars go dim, 

moonlight and sand as a resonance 

of the dust of bones, and nothing more

Katyusha Rockets 

The 107s have a crackling sound 

of fire and electricity, of air-ruckled heat, 

and when they pinwheel over the rooftops 

of Hamman al Alil 

they just keep going, 

traveling for years over the horizon 

to land in the meridians of Divisadero Street, 

where I’m standing early one morning 

on a Memorial Day in Fresno, California, 

the veteran’s parade scattering at the impact, 

mothers shielding their children by instinct, 

old war vets crouching behind automobiles 

as police set up an outer cordon 

for the unexploded ordinance. 

Rockets often fall 

in the night sky of the skull, down long avenues 

of the brain’s myelin sheathing, over synapses 

and the rough structures of thought, they fall 

into the hippocampus, into the seat of memory— 

where lovers and strangers and old friends 

entertain themselves, unaware of the dangers 

headed their way, or that I will need to search 

among them 

the way the bomb disposal tech 

walks tethered and alone down Divisadero Street, 

suited-up as if walking on the moon’s surface 

as the crowd watches just how determined he is 

to dismantle death, to take it apart 

piece by piece—the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. 

“Here, Bullet,” “Eulogy,” “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief,” “Night in Blue,” and “Katyusha Rockets” from Here, Bullet.

Copyright ©2005 by Brian Turner.
Reprinted with the permission of Alice James Books http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/here_bullet.html