My Mother Contemplating Her Gun Poem by Nick Flynn

One boyfriend said to keep the bullets

locked in a different room.
Another urged
clean it
or it could explode. Larry

thought I should keep it loaded
under my bed,
you never know.

I bought it
when I didn't feel safe. The barrel
is oily,

reflective, the steel

pure, pulled from a hole
in West Virginia. It

could have been cast into anything, nails
along the carpenter's lip, the ladder

to balance the train. Look at this, one
bullet,

how almost nothing it is—

saltpeter sulphur lead Hell

burns sulphur, a smell like this.
safety & hammer, barrel & grip

I don't know what I believe.

I remember the woods behind my father's house
horses beside the quarry

stolen cars lost in the deepest wells,
the water below
an ink waiting to fill me.

Outside a towel hangs from a cold line
a sheet of iron in the sky

roses painted on it, blue roses.

Tomorrow it will still be there.