Luck Left Over for Those Who Lose Games of Russian Roulette

In a burst of the kind of youthful invincibility that I feel

a little robbed of for never having experienced myself,

my great-grandfather once put a bullet two centimeters

into his skull in a drunken game of Russian roulette

and so he spent the rest of his life knowing that any fall or

solid smack could jolt it into the soft tissue of his brain

and remove him from this world in one sense or another,

yet somehow still lived as normal a life as a man could,

knowing that all memory of his children or his wife might

be wiped out by the stray china thrown in one of her famous

tantrums and no one who remembers him remembers him

doing anything other than smiling sweetly, except maybe

to doubt the things I am told. There are holes in these stories

a couple centimeters deep and I am beginning to notice

that lodged in each of them is a bullet that got there because

every story thinks itself invincible in its own way and

each bullet followed my great-grandfather’s across the Atlantic

to this place called New York and watched daily as he smiled

sweetly and whispered nonsensical German whimsy to his

wife who was sweet when she wasn’t angry and each story

bears children as stories do and the children of these stories

sternly tell their own children not to roughhouse around

their grandparents for fear they might disappear like I worry

sometimes that you might if I get rowdy and so together we

politely ignore the holes and know better than to prod at the

things we are told and at the things that we love. And so

here I am telling you that tonight this invincible poem gets

drunk with its friends and gets drunk with their revolver.

And the whiskey says something wonderful and the gun

says something playful under its breath and the bullet

says something that came out louder than it intended and

the friends say something terrifying and in German which is

probably redundant and now this poem has a hole in it and

the hole says you are very unlucky and the doctors say

you are very lucky and for the first time in its life, this poem

smiles sweetly and remembers it has something to tell you.