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| Photograph by Angela Callanan |
“Chicago shootings: At least 33 shot, 5 fatally, in weekend gun violence across city, police say.”
—ABC7 Chicago, June 10, 2024
“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”
“Unbending the shape of the pew
from their backs and shuffling
the pooled blood”
I’m writing this fresh as it happened a few minutes ago,
a high-speed chase where the front vehicle almost hit mine,
turning off quickly into the apartment parking lot where I live,
although live isn’t the right word, the car tiny, like a Mitsubishi
Mirage, the back with metal mangled like tentacles, maybe hit
by a cop car, and there are about nine police vehicles directly
behind him—I assume it’s a him, the prisons are filled with hims—
and they Doppler by, police trucks in the rear, a couple unmarked
squad cars in back, almost all with lights on, but, strangely, no
sirens, as if they have all forgot about the sound, too caught up
in this road with its polluted beautiful trees all in a hypnotic
perfect fake line, and I stop there, craning my neck back to
watch cop car after cop car after cop car and then the stillness,
the clouds all leaking into each other so that it feels like one large
pool of cloud that keeps spilling out and two students walk two dogs
and one nips at the other and bark-whines and the silence again
until the gunshots start popping, scattered, quick, then done, gone,
and I park, get out. This isn’t the first shooting I’ve heard lately.
The last one was a murder. A sushi restaurant across the street.
They wanted the guy’s watch. He didn’t give it to ‘em,
so they gave it to him. That’s what a neighbor said. The U.S.
has four of the most dangerous cities in the world. The entire
world. I live in one of them. Although live doesn’t seem to be
the right word. I asked today, before this happened, if I could
get out of my lease, the landlord sitting behind his desk the size
of a corpse. He talked like he hated talking. The Lord of the Land.
He said no. He said I could buy it out. On Generalized Anxiety
Disorder tests, they ask, Do you feel trapped? I look out the window
right now, glance, typing this. The trees are still. There’s no wind.
There’s an ouch to the landscape, like you can feel the earth itself,
whispering to us, What are you doing? We don’t know. In the last
three days, there’ve been mass shootings in Wisconsin (10 shot),
D.C. (6 shot), Alabama and Nevada and Texas and Virginia (4 shot
at each); they only count a mass shooting if it’s “4+ victims injured or
killed,” so that the other 43 shootings where 2 to 3 were shot or
killed wouldn’t have to be counted, and then the eleven pages on
the Gun Violence Archive online that includes the one shot or killed,
so often, when I looked through the “View Incident” option, it lists
the victims as “Teen 12-17,” “rooftop party ranging in age from 14
to 23-yrs old were shot,” “Teen 12-17,” “Park Party” attendants,
“Teen 12-17,” “House Party” teens. Teens, teens, teens. Tens
of teens. Hundreds. Thousands. Children. The repetition. I keep
writing about this. History rhymes. I swear to God, as I’m wrapping
up this poem, more gunshots. Were those gunshots? I ask a neighbor.
He doesn’t know, but he heard the cop cars. He says he doesn’t know.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).