title: How To Take A Bullet: And Other Survival Poems
author: Hollie Hardy
description: HOLLIE HARDY can teach you how to survive anything. She is an adjunct English instructor at Berkeley City College and lecturer at San Francisco State University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry. An active participant in the local Bay Area literary scene, Hardy co-hosts the popular monthly reading series, Saturday Night Special, An East Bay Open Mic. She is one of the founders of the annual Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland, curator of Litquakes of Poets, and a former Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. Her work has appeared in The Common, Eleven Eleven, Milvia Street, One Ded Cow, Parthenon West Review, A Sharp Piece of Awesome, sPARKLE & bLink, Transfer, and other journals. She lives in Oakland, California. www.holliehardy.com
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  _A girl with a terrible gift..._
  
  
  
  
  
  I stood, flipping the cylinders back into place and pulling back the hammers.
  My heart also hammered.
  
  
  _There will come a time when you are about to die,_ Uncle had said. It was the
  last lesson he had taught me _. If you have guns, you will survive, but only
  if you surrender to it. Let it fill every part of you, like water in a cup.
  Let it spill over, and then kill everyone._
  
  
  It had frightened me badly when he told me. Uncle had spoken of killing as if
  it meant nothing. He stopped me when I protested. He wanted me to understand.
  
  
  _If you can do that, you’ll live. If you can pull back after it is done, you
  will remain human._
  
  
  And I let it happen. My hands shook, but not with fear. The hum roared through
  me, more so than any other time. I nearly cried out from the painful ecstasy
  of it. Feet shuffled outside the room, I sensed where they were in relation to
  me. I could _feel_ it.
  
  
  I took a deep breath and unlatched the doo