In the seventy-two hours before I wrote this line,
two hundred fifty-one shot, ninety-two killed
in America. Two hundred thirteen shooters
with two hundred thirteen guns. In seventy-two hours.
The litany of shattered bones is endless. To list
the names and numbers shot, to catalogue
the body parts stopped, the skin rended,
the night terrors loosed in the dreams of bystanders,
to count the wrung hands, the thoughts and prayers,
the shaken heads of the rest of us—this is
what pornography looks like: us at a distance, gazing
at the ruined flesh, the survivors, the fallen
as objects of a feral lust. I mistake the dead
for something other than dead, see them as credits
in a snuff film that I watch on repeat, on shuffle mode,
over and over, so numb that love is no longer at stake.
But thats all it is: love
lost, love missing, love bought, love sold
by the wheelbarrow load, love as seen on TV,
love that can be viewed through the sighting scope
of a gun. I look at this like the shooter does, as redemption,
and just like the man with the gun, I am able to look away
when I’ve had enough. But there is never enough.
There are a trillion bullets left in the world
and sufficient ire to strike the primer of every one,
and seventeen of them lodged in Americans since I’ve begun
writing this poem. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty-one.
Dick Westheimer has—with his wife and writing companion Debbie—lived in rural southwest Ohio for over 40 years. His most recent poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Minyan, Gyroscope Review, The Banyan Review, Ritual Well, and Cutthroat. His debut chapbook Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by Sheila Na Gig Books.