Annie Christain

The Second Draw Is the First Gun

“#1…Go and get yourself a gun, but be careful where you get it from.” “The Nine Gun Crime Commandments,” Billy Bright, Coming Soon Vol. 1, Gun in Your Face Records

You know them by how any time they need a sword,

they have one

and by how abduction fantasy websites

remind them of their study abroad time in Geneva.

They want to be the observer

and women the device. 

A father communicates to one through the press,

Just give her back, and we’ll forgive you.

I ask one, “Are you still blue eyes and 6’1’’?”

They’re always lifting up the floorboards to clean under them. 

A psychic said she saw all the lightbodies leave United Airlines Flight 175

before it hit the World Trade Center,

so maybe Yingying was gone by the time

she entered his car.  

King Solomon saw a female demon raping human men

and asked, Are there any actual female demons?,

knowing what gweilo,

ghost man, foreign devil men do

and are capable of,

say thousands of Chinese fathers with daughters in America.  

When you hear that in Thailand,

many Western men who marry the locals

are pushed off the tops of skyscrapers,

you have to ask, why?

If you record a group of White men

hanging out at Korean churches,

you’ll know.

The police match my body positions

to read his mind without a warrant,

and the second draw is the first gun.

I say: Many of the compounds used to reassemble the missing women

are already used in tire manufacturing.

They have no idea the danger they’re putting me in. 

People say they saw her in the town where she disappeared,

but that’s just a crisis actor who’s getting paid to be homeless.

If you doubt his motive,

understand he did go on Tinder

to pick the perfect White woman—

the perfect White woman

to bring to a vigil for his Asian victim,

but I shouldn’t keep making this about me. 

Annie Christain is an associate professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill and a former artist resident of the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel and the Arctic Circle Art and Science Expedition. Her poems have appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, The Chariton Review, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She received the grand prize of the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Tall As You Are Tall Between Them, her debut poetry book, was published in fall 2016 by C&R Press.