Shooting from the Lip
A Poem by Marya Summers
It was the hour of showdown. The miraculous hour.” –Patti Smith
You have never had a gun. But you have always stood your ground, mouth like an automatic weapon, ripping through the preposterous bodies of arguments, counterfeit claims, more holes than substance. No matter what it cost, you were willing to pay it, loaded your mouth with another round while the enemy looked to cut you down: napalm the bank account, close the ranks so that everyone told the same fiction, intimidation by exile, by hunger, by confiscating the last comfort that propped your spirit. In domestic terror, they tried to mow you down, make you cow, and you, in that miraculous hour, stood up and fired back a litany. The miracle was in your belief in your power. “Just bite your tongue, close your mouth, stop talking,” some people pleaded as you took another blow, another punishment – another rejection you carried like a life sentence. The miracle was you knew the truth really could set you free. And that life sentence? It became an epic – all written in a language that once rained like bullets then spilled as bloody ink.
Marya Summers (she/her) is a chronically ill, disabled poet who lives unhoused with her wonder cat Perceval as a result of environmental illness, insufficient social safety nets, and lack of accessible housing. She is a 2023 Lighthouse Writers New Voices Fellow and former Poet-in-Residence at Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, The Fourth River, Tiferet, Pensive, Rise Up Review, Kaleidoscope Magazine, and Braided Way, among others. Find her at whollycreative.com.
Thank you, Wayfarer Magazine!
This poem stands out for its gripping gun metaphor that frames words as unstoppable firepower in the face of illness and exclusion. The real spark is how it flips “bullets” of defiance into “bloody ink” for an epic tale, turning hardship into heroic poetry. Congratulations Marya!