Lewis Mundt
Bullet
I woke
two years later
bandages
off, someone
had been trimming
my hair in my
sleep.
She was a quiet
bullet, I
remember
how I turned
my head (now
it hurts to
turn
my head) and then
nothing, no
noise, I
woke two years
later in an
empty room and
did not remember
the pull
of my own
lungs, the burden
of my
own filled chest.
They (always the
they) shined
their lights on
me, they
took samples of things,
someone had
been trimming my
hair in
my sleep, I drank
water with heavy arms,
slept for stretches more
I cannot recall.
And they showed me
the scar, not
even a wound now
but a scar,
sucking the flesh in-
between my ribs,
the ghost
trailing out my back.
I touch it
in the dark.
You got
lucky, they said.
She passed
clean through.
Lewis Mundt's poem Bullet is also part of a video by Wayne Nelsen and Bill Reichelt, presented in this edition of Sleet.
Lewis Mundt is a writer, performer, and publisher living in Minneapolis. He is the producer of the New Sh!t Show Minneapolis for Word Sprout, director of the Hamline University Poetry Slam, and works at the Loft Literary Center's education department. His first full-length collection, The God of the Whole Animal, was released in 2015. More at lewismundt.com.