Bullets
A poem by Ye Chun
The following piece appears in our Summer 2025 issue. Order it here.
for Tan Xiaojie, 1971–2021 He went into the bathroom and came out with a gun. Who isn’t afraid of bullets? He’d loaded the gun to become the gun, a body packed with bullets. I had a gun, too, kept under my pillow, where I’d rested my head, drafting an itinerary for world travel—unstoppable by the bullet that tore a red exit from my body. I know bodies—restless, reasonless, knots and rocks of aches and wants I’d kneaded down, each within the reach of a bullet ricocheting, spinning—on this land where I’d found myself fighting frailties with my hands—much like the other land, except bullets for ten dollars a box. Now I’ve seen ruins left to further ruin. I’ve seen wide waters crossed and still to be crossed by the whistles of bullets, where loons cry through misty mornings, fighting for territory, which—if I let myself—I’ll hear as wails for the world’s waiting bullets.
Ye Chun is a bilingual Chinese American writer and literary translator. She has published two books of poetry, Travel Over Water (Bitter Oleander Press) and Lantern Puzzle (Tupelo Press), which won the Berkshire Prize. Her novel, Straw Dogs of the Universe (Catapult), received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her story collection, Hao (Catapult), was named a Lit Hub’s Best Book of the Year and an Electric Lit’s Favorite Short Story Collection of the Year. She is also the author of a novel in Chinese and four volumes of poetry translations. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, she is an associate professor at Providence College and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
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