It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You, It’s The Hole
Inspired by "Four Talks" by Laurie Anderson
Angela Siew was one of our Summer 2024 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we give our residents the option to publish an excerpt of their work, write a process piece, or have a Q&A with us. Here, Angela shares a poem whose title comes from Laurie Anderson’s “Four Talks” exhibit (two pictures below), which is currently showing at Hirshhorn. To see the other features, visit Well-Crafted, our community blog.
It’s Not The Bullet That Kills You, It’s The Hole
Suppose it’s 1976. You are
your mother’s best friend.
You know what her future
will be like, what she will feel
at 75, that sometimes her greatest
excitement in the day
will be to tell her doctor son
when he calls
that she now no longer
has to serve jury duty.
No pressure to fulfill
a civic duty for a country
she didn’t want to come to
at first, a country that has accepted her
kind of, despite her accent, her foreignness,
and now her age.
Tell her that in 45 years
she will tell her husband,
who never really recovered
from open heart surgery
that they made the right decision.
That their children will be happy,
will be free,
that they, too, will be happy.
Tell her, while she’s standing
in the convenience store in Kowloon
near their one-bedroom apartment,
while your older brother
is kicking, that she should pick
the more expensive barber scissors
with the comfortable grip.
That her children will visit often
and won’t leave her,
that her husband will still cut
his daughter’s hair with his dim eyes
in the living room
while she talks about
how those scissors are older than you are,
while she explains she’d heard haircuts
were expensive in the US,
that she’ll yell at your father
not to worry about the mess,
to step aside as she sweeps up the black clippings.
*
Images from Laurie Anderson’s exhibit, Four Talks.
