Brian Turner’s “Here, Bullet” consists of sixteen unrimed lines. The speaker addresses a “bullet,” dramatizing the theme of fear. Although Turner’s experience as a soldier in the Iraq War informs his works, it is the universal character of this poem that distinguishes it from other war poems. The speaker of this poem is not necessarily involved in war; the speaker could be anyone who deeply contemplates death by gunshot.
“If a body is what you want”
The speaker says to the bullet, “If a body is what you want, / then here is bone and gristle and flesh.” “Gristle” is the term used for cartilage in meat, that is, when an animal’s body has been slaughtered for its “meat,” the animal’s cartilage is referred to as “gristle.” By calling his own body’s cartilage “gristle,” the speaker is dehumanizing his own body.
By addressing the inanimate object, “bullet,” as if it had a desire, the speaker is personifying that object. He implies that the bullet wants a body, and that he is willing to offer his. But by dehumanizing his own body, his offering to the bullet is lessened. Instead of a human body, the bullet will, in fact, get only an animal’s body with “bone and gristle and flesh.”
To further dehumanize this body offering, the speaker refers to the “clavicle-snapped wish.” He further devolves from a mammal into a fowl; it is the chicken’s wishbone that is “snapped” in the little ritual to determine who gets a wish; the person whose wishbone snapped off bigger gets his wish.
Next, the speaker creates a surrealistic image, “the aorta’s opened valves.” The aorta is itself a valve and does not possess valves. Thus, the speaker confuses the would-be bullet by claiming that he is offering it something that he does not even possess.
The speaker’s next offering is “the leap / thought makes at the synaptic gap.” With this gift to the bullet, he has snapped himself back to a thinking human being. But now he encounters the desperation of fear again.
“Here is the adrenaline rush you crave”
In order to mollify that fear, the speaker heightens the personification of the bullet; now the bullet, like the human being fearing the bullet, possesses an “adrenaline rush” and has learned to “crave” that rush, as human beings who have become addicted to the substance do. The bullet receives its “adrenaline rush” from its “inexorable flight, that insane puncture / into heat and blood.” When the bullet is fired, it becomes unstoppable; its flight cannot end until is crashes into something solid.
And as the bullet strikes its target of a body, its crazed and determined speed “puncture[s]” that body of “heat and blood.” The concept confuses the thinking human’s synapses across which those thoughts continually “leap,” and the only way to parse the nihility of such an occurrence is to call it “insane.” But the speaker cannot stop his anxiety and fear with mere naming-calling; thus, he challenges the bullet by taunting, “And I dare you to finish / what you’ve started.”
“here is where I complete the word you bring”
The speaker now takes complete ownership of the situation. He has bargained with the bullet, making it utterly a debating collaborate, but its trajectory cannot be changed; only the speaker’s attitude can change in his confrontation with an insane, adrenaline charged entity.
Thus the speaker asserts, “Because here, Bullet, // here is where I complete the word you bring / hissing through the air.” The speaker insists that he will have the last word; he will not allow the bullet to take his body without offering a strong, positive rejoinder.
“my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have”
Cleverly, the speaker then transforms himself into a weapon; his own body becomes the place from where, “I moan / the barrel’s cold esophagus.” No longer an animal, no longer a chicken with a wishbone, he is now made of the same cold steel upon which the bullet relies for its very existence. His moan is capable of “triggering // my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have / inside of me.”
It does not matter that the bullet may lodge itself deep within his body, for he is now a weapon himself, and he is the place where “the world ends, every time.” The expendable, physical body may seem desirable to the ignorant bullet, but the human being is capable of realizing his nature as a soul, who will exist even if the insane bullet punctures that flesh and blood.
The soul’s spiritual weapon excoriates the physical bullet, shaming it into the nothingness that is really is. The fear with which the speaker began his drama has evaporated into the rarified air of knowledge of the eternal, infinite soul.
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