~ Delta Poetry Review ~

LC Gutierrez

A Homicide Is Justifiable in Louisiana

(1)  When committed in self-defense by one who reasonably believes that he is in imminent danger of losing his life or receiving great bodily harm and that the killing is necessary to save himself from that danger. (Louisiana Law RS 14:20)

You won’t forget how loud a bang can be.

A finger-triggered imprint on the brain

bolts you up in bed 20 years beyond

the smoke and acrid punch of powder.

Another physics: an equal and opposite reaction

to that much air sucked out of gut-punched memory.

Sound, light, heat, locked in a brutal thunderclap

occupies a vacuum that occupies you

where you should find feeling.

Had you known a bullet’s cost or a life’s heft

or the meaning and volume of perpetrator:

you standing your ground

or the guy forever lying, dying on it?

Because you failed to sentinel your soul

and let that bullet bite away, a measured stray.

Its mark, a tired, tattered, phantom of a man,

his own life sucked out of a crack pipe.

It’s you, now straining in the sitting room of the spirit,

that you might steal a view through the door and know

what price there is beyond the gravitas you slung

across your shoulder on that day:

a stranger’s tangled weight.

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the Southern USA and the Caribbean. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches, and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work is published or forthcoming in Hobart, Trampoline, Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, and other wonderful journals.