I know what the journalists were doing the second the glass doors shattered,
each shard like a news story broken, a gun loping in from the lobby
like a wounded wolf.
Now journalism itself shatters like those glass doors.
I worked at a paper just like the one shot up in Annapolis,
slaving away there in my twenties, first as secretary
then as a full-fledged writer making eleven hundred dollars a month.
The editor and I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee mornings
outside a building just like the one shot up in Annapolis.
Oh how that gunman took their lives—breezily—as the traffic flowed by.
The writers proud of their by-lines
and of the by-lines to come; their stories like headstones
in the rolling cemetery of the news.
Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.
