ZENO IN AMERICA

by Dale Wisely

A Black teenager was shot in the head by a white homeowner in Kansas City, Mo., after showing up at the wrong house to pick up his siblings, lawyers for his family said. Family members identified the victim online as Ralph Pual Yarl, a 16-year-old high school junior. You can contribute to a GoFundMe to help pay for the boy’s hospital bills.

 

Imagine a bullet approaching its target. It may help to think in slow motion. Let’s say it’s seven inches away from impact. No, let’s say eight because it is important for us to be able to divide readily. No pesky fractions. Haven’t we had enough fractions? Eight inches and... slow that bullet way down. Before it reaches skin, layers rich in capillaries, then skull... but if you’d rather think of, say, a sheet of drywall, that will do. So do. Do think of drywall.

 

Before the bullet makes contact it must pass the four-inch mark. Then the two-inch mark; then it’s just an inch away from, let’s say, plywood. Sheet metal. Or a STOP sign on a rural road. We can’t avoid fractions after all. When we keep dividing, we get fractions.

 

Then one-half inch. Then a quarter inch. Almost there. But next is the last one-eight inch. Stop there. Or halfway from there to the target. It doesn't matter where you stop. Just stop. Wherever you stop, think of that as a place where nothing is struck. Where the space left to travel is nothing and everything. Where nothing is pierced, shattered, ended. Where everything is as it was. This is a place where things go so fast and have so little space remaining and so little time left. Where a thing is about to happen but never does. I’m trying to say that this is a place where the skin remains intact and blood is retained in vessels, and bone unshattered. 

Dale Wisely runs Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, publisher of the journals Right Hand Pointing, One Sentence Poems, Unlost, Unbroken, duality, and first frost.