One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead
Both of them were history, even before one
pulled the trigger, before I rocketed through
the smoking barrel hidden in the honeysuckle
before I tore through a man’s back, shattered
his family, a window, and tore through an inner wall
before I bounced off a refrigerator and a coffeepot
before I landed at my destined point in history
—next to a watermelon. What was cruel was the irony
not the melon, not the man falling in slow motion,
but the man squinting through the crosshairs
reducing the justice system to a small circle, praying
that he not miss, then sending me to deliver a message
as if the woman screaming in the dark
or the children crying at her feet
could ever believe
a bullet was small enough to hate.
Notes:
“One-Third of 180 Grams of Lead” is reprinted from Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and is part of the folio “Frank X Walker: Kinfolk.” Read the rest of the folio in the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry.
Source: Poetry (January/February 2026)