a kiss or a bullet

So, obviously, I haven't posted a poem in a week. I did have some of the last week already planned out on my spreadsheet, but I haven't had the wherewithal to do the posting itself—this trip has been really wonderful in a lot of ways (leaving aside the couple of days last week when I was super sick), but it's also been absolutely packed, and when I haven't been actively doing something, I have mostly been lying on my hotel bed trying to recoup my energy. We fly home tomorrow, and I might spend the last few days of the month doubling up on poems, but I may also come in a little short, this year. It happens! Sometimes life is a lot!

With all that being said, here is a poem for yesterday, April 22 (which is when I started writing this post). Later today, if I can get the internet to work a little better than it's working right now, I might post a poem in honor of Shakespeare's birth/day day; but for now, this one. Warnings for references to gun violence.

Say Stop.

Keep your lips pressed together
after you say the p:

(soon they'll try
and pry

your breath out—)

―

Whisper it
three times in a row:

Stop Stop Stop

In a hospital bed
like a curled up fish, someone's

gulping at air—

How should you apply
your breath?

—

List all of the people
you would like
to stop.

Who offers love,
who terror—

Write Stop.
Put a period at the end.

Decide if it's a kiss
or a bullet.

—Dana Levin, "Instructions for Stopping," 2017. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 6, 2017, and in Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S. (Beacon, 2017). In the notes on the poem, Levin says, "To write this poem, I sat in a room, saying 'stop' over and over in order to hear how it sounded, to feel how it felt in my mouth. Then I wrote it down. Then I added a period, which posed the deciding question."