Tonight's Poet Corner: I'm Sorry, But I Had To

I'm Sorry, But I Had To
by Belinda Roddie

She fired the gun eight times,
and eight bullets shrieked from
its dripping nose. They left red kisses
on the front of her father's shirt, her
brother's blazer, her mother's blouse.
Gray, blue, and white, stained by a
foreign, violent love. All of them

survived their wounds, and she
was pulled screaming into the maw
of a police car, its jaws snapping
her up like raw meat, wailing as
it spun her into a world of bars and
tiny windows, windows that, when
she peered out of them, only had

drab, black and white views, fragments
of sterile life before the alcohol
and the drugs and the fights, before
her husband clawed at her face and wished
aloud that she were dead, before he poured
toxins from highballs into her brain so that
she thought her family was the enemy.
She could only look at views
the size of bullet holes.