$56,800 by Robert Fillman

$56,800

       “Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the USA
       since John Lennon was shot and killed on 8 Dec 1980.”
       — from a Tweet published by Yoko Ono

for John Lennon’s first pair
of Windsor spectacles,
sold at Sotheby’s London
to the highest bidder,
an investment in glass
and wire, the auctioning
of short sightedness, John’s
fragile nature, one man’s
blurred vision of the world
retrofitted into
a conversation piece.

His bloody glasses too
are on display, encased
beside a crumpled brown
bag of blood-drunk clothing
at the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame, a perverse kind
of show-and-tell, Yoko
helping us to rehearse
his dying. Imagine

those bullets hissing through
bone and flesh, one lodging
in the aorta, how
John inched forward. Last thing
he saw maybe Yoko
screaming, a policeman’s
horror, a doctor or
nurse fumbling for vitals,

maybe nothing at all,
the frames already whipped
from the bridge of his nose,
the street a carnival
of psychedelic haze,
his own essence smudging
out the windows of sight
before his eyes were closed.

*

Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His collection The Melting Point will be published in 2025 by Broadstone Books. Individual poems have appeared in Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania.