Safe

The first time a boy held
a gun to my head, I said, God,
but I’m poor too. We laughed
through the robbery.
I remember nothing of him
but his youth. Like me, just a teen.
The sheen of sweat held light
on his lip like the eye of a pond.
We are all citizens of the country of harm,
my high-school diary reads afterwards,
dramatic but making points.
That same month, school locked down
so long boys pissed in trash cans
they pulled away from the windows.
No one looked and no one laughed. In 2021,
you don’t let me watch you unload your gun
and that’s how I know you love me.
From the stairwell, I listen to you
work the clattering animal in your palm.
I imagine it dismantled: bullets loosened
from its cartridge like milk-teeth, the soft O
of its mouth inoculated, locked in the safe
vivisected and gleaming. I know you hate it,
it’s just in case. But love, I don’t feel safe,
I only feel American. Even held against you,
the wide window of your body. Yes, even when
your thumb presses the soft ladle of my tongue
and I taste not gunmetal, only salt. Even then,
even we—