MASS SHOOTINGS #4

2700 block, W Michigan Ave, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, September 20, 2025

by Ron Riekki

I see fog: the feel of San Francisco,
of swamp, of isolation, of Gothic,
 
of Dickens, of Doyle, of death.
A girl's dressed Goth, smoking
outside the bar across the street.
The air is thick with cannabis,
 
so much so that I feel high just
walking.  I get food.  While I
wait, I go to other businesses
nearby.  There’s multiple, all
 
supplying either food or drink,
signs with a bright white VAPE
and a thick red BEER/LIQUOR.
I’ve come late, to get a feel for
 
what it was like at the time that
the shooting happened.  This is
Michigan’s fourth mass shooting
in two months.  We’re borderline
 
on campus/off campus.  I wonder
where in the parking lot that it
happened.  I go to a pizza place
while waiting for my food.  They
 
nod that, yes, they know about
the shooting.  It happened at
the building next door.  I go
across the street, to a bar, ask
 
for water.  They give me some.
I talk to the security guard, ask
him if he knows anything about
the shooting.  He points where
 
it happened, across the street.
I ask if he’s worried about any
more shootings.  No, he says.
I go in Two Fellas Grill.  Its
 
name reminds me of the film
Goodfellas.  “Layla.”  Tommy
gets whacked.  The place is
empty, totally empty, except
 
four employees.  I ask if they
heard about the shooting.
They look me over.  Why’m
I asking about the shooting?
 
One guy looks to see what’s
in my hand.  I’m holding
a notebook.  I don’t take
notes.  The guy says he
 
took video, of the aftermath.
Was he here when it happened?
No.  But he lives nearby.
He came right away.  I ask
 
what caused it.  A girl
behind the counter says
there’s lots of rumors,
maybe gang-related, or
 
maybe somebody got
jumped.  She says that
Kalamazoo used to be
the 4^th most dangerous
 
city, but now it’s 2^nd.
The guy says changes
are going to happen.
I ask what.  He says,
 
Changes.  Like what?
He says that’s being
talked about, but they
used to close at 4 a.m.,
 
but now they’re going
to close at 3 a.m. instead.
I ask about cameras and
he says they have those
 
already.  I tell him that
there must be incentive,
since this is campus and
there’s students to protect.
 
He says we have to protect
everyone.  He asks if I’m
going to order anything.
I can tell he’s done.  I go
 
back to the place where I
ordered food.  I eat next
to another table covered
with boxes, old computer
 
screens, a big bag of soy
sauce, the feel more like
warehouse than restaurant.
I talk to the workers there—
 
a chef, a driver, a guy who
takes the orders.  One says
he lives in Battle Creek, sees
shootings all the time, more
 
than I can count on my hands,
that’s for sure.  I ask what can
be done to lessen the violence.
It can’t be helped.  I ask if there
 
is anything we can do.  All three
say that they don’t think anything
is going to change gun violence
in America.  Nothing.  There’s
 
a tip jar nearby that’s marked:
Tiperoni J Thank yoooooooo
The phone rings constantly.
Nobody eats inside, but Door
 
Dash people keep coming in
and out.  The guy asks me if
I want to see the footage of
the shooting.  I’m stunned.
 
You have it on camera?  He
pulls out his phone and in
a few seconds I’m seeing it
happen in front of me.  It’s
 
five black kids.  Children,
really.  Looking high-school
age.  And it lasts for just
seconds.  Maybe eight or
 
so seconds.  An ugly brawl
where fists are flailing and
it feels a bit like four against
one, except it’s too chaotic
 
to fully know who fights who
and quick, incredibly quick,
so quick that I have him show
me the footage three times:
 
one of them pulls out a gun
and starts shooting.  One kid
shot in the stomach and three
shot in the feet.  This is what
 
I realize—how incredibly
fast someone can pull out
a gun.  Another revelation:
how having a gun doesn’t
 
protect you.  He fired five
shots before I even realized
he’d pulled a gun out.  Where
did he get it? I ask.  It seems
 
like it just magically appeared.
From his pants, the guy says,
taking his phone back.  That’s
how fast, in three seconds, less,
 
you can shoot four people.  I
pull out my phone, time it.
It’s maybe two seconds and
four people have been shot.
 
And all of them could have
concealed weapons/permits
and it would do nothing.
We have this conversation
 
just ten days after Charlie
Kirk’s debating gun violence
was ended by gun violence
and I ask the three in front
 
of me, saying, you must have
some ideas of solutions, and
they say, no, there is nothing
we can do, and I push them
 
on this, but they stick to it,
this feeling of hopelessness.
I leave.  I’ve gone to three
other mass shootings and
 
people there have had ideas
of how to fix things, but now
the feeling is there’s nothing
we can do.  I go to the parking
 
lot and have this revelation that
the shooting happened inside
the restaurant.  I had just seen
the footage.  I’d assumed it
 
was in the parking lot, but
it was inside.  I get in my car.
A podcast starts up.  It’s three
men talking in toxic hyper-
 
masculine language.  I turn
it off.  I start to drive down
the street.  A car is alongside
me, going the exact same speed.
 
They’re in the passing lane, but
they don’t pass, just riding along-
side.  I make a turn I don’t need
to make.  I stop to get some gas.
 
The signs here say:
5 C OFF A GAL
REWARDS
and
 
2 SLICE S OF
P IZZA   &
L G  BI G GLUP
4 W  RE WARDS
 
I’m feeling depressed, but I laugh
at the word “GLUP.”  I pay, sit
down and look up to see another
sign on a pawn shop nearby:
 
GUNS &
AMMO

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

A PLAN FOR ROSH HASHANAH

by Anita Pulier

New Year’s greetings

line up in my in-box

alongside desperate pleas.

I skip past

Unicef

NOW

Planned Parenthood

J Street

The ACLU

The DNC

Bernie and Elizabeth

Earthquake and hurricane relief

and Gaza, and Gaza.

open only

holiday greetings,

an invitation to cast off sin

at the beach with kith and kin.

Yet the weeping world is insistent,

oozes through cyberspace and

drowns out the trumpeting shofar.

There I am, stranded, sandwiched

between the seasonal rituals of an ancient

holiday and others’ jarring pain.

I nod to the god

I do not believe in,

propose a deal:

keep everyone I love safe and

I will grapple with despair and failure tomorrow.

Today I will nurture joy and unfounded optimism,

eat apples and honey,

celebrate the tribe.

Anita Pulier's latest book is Leaving Brooklyn. (Kelsay Books) Anita’s poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been a featured poet on The Writer's Almanac and Cultural Daily. 

DAUGHTERS

by Clare Richardson-Barlow

Judith Butler

Amid all the other breaking news consuming the United States this month, the University of California, Berkeley, arguably the nation’s most elite public university, gave the Trump administration a list of 160 names of faculty, staff and students, as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents”. While all the names on this list are significant, one name in particular that UC Berkeley handed over to the Trump administration stands out: Judith Butler, the eminent queer theorist, literary theorist and philosopher, and one of the most famous public intellectuals in the United States today. In addition to Butler’s name representing one of the most high-profile academic scalps demanded by the Trump administration in its campaign against higher education so far, Butler’s name is also notable for another reason: Butler is proudly and publicly Jewish, and has written extendively about their Jewish identity and how it informs their politics. In the name of “fighting antisemitism”, the Trump administration is publicly making an example out of arguably the most famous Jewish public intellectual in the country today. —The Guardian, September 22, 2025

They pass the names along,
as though paper could hold a body.
Butler’s among them—
the one who told us
gender is a stage,
a script rehearsed until it feels like bone.

Now the government calls their name,
writes it as accusation,
as though thought itself
were treason.

I think of the mothers in Palestine,
their daughters’ names whispered
to checkpoints and borders,
written into files,
circulated in offices
where no one sees their faces.
A name becomes a burden to carry,
a permission denied.

Butler compared it to Kafka—
to McCarthy, to lists, to silence—
and I believe them.
A list is never just a list.
It is the beginning of forgetting
and the rehearsal of fear.

And still,
I return to the crib
where my baby curls her hand around mine,
her pudgy fist the size of a plum.
She cannot ask yet what it means to be a girl,
but already the world
is writing her story,
already she is among the daughters
who must learn to abide.

Butler’s voice is not just theirs.
It is the echo of every woman
who has been told to hush,
every mother
who has watched her child’s name
crossed out by a hand of power.

What is silenced will not stay silent.
What is written down
will be read again.
Even in exile,
even in mourning,
Her many voices endure—
not performance,
but song.

Clare Richardson-Barlow is a writer, political economist, and lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her work spans academic, policy, and creative forms, with a focus on climate, energy, and justice. Before academia, she worked in Washington, D.C. think tanks on international policy. Her poetry and essays often explore womanhood, memory, and myth, especially how women’s voices are silenced and reimagined as strength. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in Yorkshire.

THE HALLS OF ACADEMIA

by Mary Janicke 

Mark Welsh didn’t resign last week as president of Texas A&M because he lost the confidence of students or faculty. He resigned because politicians demanded it. And that should outrage anyone who believes universities exist to pursue knowledge rather than to appease partisans. The sequence was depressingly predictable. A children’s literature course included material about gender identity. One student objected, invoked religion and a Trump-era executive order, and complained. Instead of being a moment for education—for engaging uncomfortable ideas—the episode became a weapon. A video went viral, lawmakers pounced, and the pressure machine revved into high gear. Welsh tried to manage the firestorm. He reassigned administrators. He fired the professor. He ordered a sweeping audit of the curriculum. But it was never going to be enough.  —Cartoon and news summary by Nick Anderson, September 21, 2025

The hallowed halls now hollowed 
Academia no longer a place for ideas
Now a place for ideology
 
A professor professes inclusiveness
Is now excluded for not honoring exclusiveness
 
A president supporting his faculty
Now questioned about his faculties
 
The learning of students stifled
Because one of them felt uncomfortable
 
So academia becomes a wasteland
Where young people go to have their minds
Closed not opened

Mary Janicke is a gardener, poet, and writer living in Texas. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her haiku appears on Substack.

STICK BOYS

by Lynne Schilling

© Bidouze Stephane | Dreamstime.com

Like a tower of graceful giraffes, Ethiopian  

boys on bamboo stilts walk high over the land.

 

The boys smile; some have intricate designs

painted on their faces or long, straight legs. 

 

Their aerial travel allows them to spot the cows 

in high grass, avoid the bites of venomous snakes.

 

It makes me think of those who bend the knee,

smudge the line between right and wrong—

 

the bottom-lined CEOs, the well-endowed

university presidents, the media moguls,

 

the politicians and puffed-up agency heads, 

the bonus-hungry citizens—

 

They look weak and cowed on the ground

among the vipers.

While Lynne Schilling has been writing poetry on and off for forty years, she began writing  seriously four years ago at age 75.. She has published in Quartet, The Alchemy Spoon, Rue Scribe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Lucky Jefferson and others. She has a poem forthcoming in contemporary haibun online. 

SCALES OF JUSTICE IN THE COURT OF LAST RESORT

by Rick Pongratz

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Let’s say there’s no judge,
it's just us, you and me,
and all of our peers, 
deliberating, pontificating, confabulating. 

Awaiting our verdict,
segregated in the balcony, sit
two made motherless in Minnesota 
next to two made fatherless in Utah,
and our children, with all of their peers.

Opposing solicitors dance before us, 
profiteers play up our fears, 
until we are hung—and together, 
pile more dead upon the plates,
to lie with all of our peers.

The left and right arms of our scales
tilt and totter with each fresh body,
the chains grown too taut, 
not made for the weight of revenge.

Rick Pongratz is an emerging poet. His poetry has appeared in Rattle and is forthcoming in Frogpond. Rick works as a mental health clinician and currently studies creative writing at Idaho State University.

SPECIAL SECRET

by g emil reutter

Posted by Mark Hamill at Bluesky

Whack-a-Mole

Jeff is still there

Throw everything against the wall

It doesn’t stick

Jeff is still there

Hammer and miss

Hammer and miss

Jeff is still there

Make crap up

Attack attack attack

Whack whack whack

Jeff is still there

What lurks in shadows

Of special secrets

Reality is creeping up

As these two creeped

Young girls.

The last one standing

Shall fall hard

And no matter how

He may try heaven is

Not calling

Virgil awaiting his arrival

g emil reutter is a writer of stories and poems. His latest release is Distance to Infinity, an anti-authoritarian poetry chapbook.

LAMENT FOR THE TIMES

by Ann Grogan

after George Eliot, “The Choir Invisible” and William Henry Channing, “My Symphony”

Primitives by Kathy

George Eliot prayed that she reach
the purest heaven;
be the cup of strength to those in agony.
I cannot seem to save myself.

I pray only to survive while
grasping at the crumbling edges 
of a giant hole into which I fall.
I cannot seem to save myself.

I try to smile, try to join in,
feed pure love, ignore the vile,
turn the world back to being kind.
I cannot seem to find the time.

What sweet luxury Channing had,
to advise we “bear all cheerfully… 
await occasions, hurry never.”
I cannot seem to find the time.

I don’t want to live in a world
where immigrants are not respected
or given dignity. 
And yet it seems I do.

I don’t want to live in a world
where women bleed out in cars because
craven doctors betray oaths to care for us.
And yet it seems I do.

Better Buddhist than bleary-eyed,
refusing the light that drives me on
to cry for help as we drown.
I cannot seem to find the light.

I try the common, I try the quiet,
I try to listen then to sing,
but stars refuse to shine on me.
I cannot seem to find the light.

Ann Grogan is a joyful octogenarian, retired lawyer, and emerging poet who lives in San Francisco, CA. Her writing promotes the unequivocal permission to pursue one’s passions at any age. Her poems have appeared in Little Old Lady, The Prairie Review, Querencia, the University of Vermont’s Continuing Education Newsletter, and on KAWL Public Media “Bay Poets”, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review. She’s the author of two volumes of poetry, Poetic Musings on Pianos, Music & Life. Her music and poetry website is rhapsodydmb.com.

MATH CLASS MADE ME NERVOUS

by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

                                                for Mr. Gigliotti

except for one, 
eleventh grade, Sequential III,
with Mr. G.
 
He looked like Steven Spielberg 
with a pocket protector and chalk in hand,
a math cult leader who converted
the most atheist of math students
into a devout follower. 
 
It all made sense in his class:
Life and its angled connectivity.
It was like having a near-death experience
for fifty minutes each day.
 
He revealed math’s sacred secrets
in ways only a child could comprehend.
He took away what I hated most:
The stifled, confined view of numbers
and showed me what it was:
 a universal balance of unity and truth. 
 
Thirty-five years later,
in a world that seems like there’s no sequence at all,
we walked and slept through 9/16/25,*
the day Pythagoras was Superman,
hauling the globe back to harmony.
 
At the very least, 
I thought of Mr. G,
and how he taught me to see.

* First, "all three of the entries in that date are perfect squares—and what I mean by that is 9 is equal to 32, 16 is equal to 42, and 25 is equal to 52," says Colin Adams, a mathematician at Williams College who was first tipped off about today's special qualities during a meeting with his former student, Jake Malarkey.

  Next, those perfect squares come from consecutive numbers—three, four, and five.

  But perhaps most special of all is that three, four, and five are an example of what's called a Pythagorean triple.

  "And what that means," explains Adams, "is that if I take the sum of the squares of the first two numbers, 32 + 42, which is 9 + 16… is equal to 25, which is 52, so 32 + 42 = 52."

  This is the Pythagorean Theorem: a2 + b2 = c2. "And that in fact is the most famous theorem in all of mathematics," says Adams.  —NPR, September 16, 2025

 

Nancy Byrne Iannucci is a librarian and poet who resides in Troy, NY, with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson.  THRUSH Poetry Journal, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Eunoia, Maudlin House, San Pedro River Review, 34 Orchard, Bending Genres, and Typehouse are some places you will find her. She is the author of four chapbooks: Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022), and Hummingbirds and Cigarettes (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci

ROBERT, NO LONGER (AM I YOUNG)

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

 

If we are refused the right to mourn

the death by fire of children in Denver

then the words of Dylan Thomas

have perhaps become equivalent to those 

of Redford’s opponent in The Candidate

 

Crocker Jarmon who bore the farm away 

with owls afloat on half wings, their beaks 

marked for taxidermies at the hands of one 

who holds their lease in a poem of a different 

name.

 

Robert, no longer am I young.

You are not bringing dignity to the undignified

character of Roy Hobbes any longer, a figment

whose greatest sin was his appetite, especially when

it came to the manager’s niece who knew beauty 

might've wanted love 

 

Redford, you could play the occasional villain

but never scum. And in your absence I wonder

if Hobbes returns to form, to the point Malamud

makes about appetites that can’t be contained

 

By outfield fences. Or the imaginations of fine

young fans. They don’t come to see you anymore

because the game, which was always partly

of the mind, dwells today in a tiny room with poor 

lighting

 

And no natural grass. Robert, I am young no longer

because the way you made Bob Woodward a warrior 

of pen on paper is impossible when so many never learn 

to write. A confession isn’t a memoir and yet we can’t escape

the text. The text is all; not even the body can tell foot from hand

without a nib.

 

But you fought for the eagle, wild rivers, expanses of mingling

bodies. Perhaps a new generation of actors will find their agency

in florid rock, beyond the tract of human mouths, who use the tongue

as a latch to withdraw monologues into long sequences of silence.

Where physical grace

 

Which you had in abundance

 

Returns talkies to their shelves. At least for awhile. 

Time enough to hear the condor, a once great Colorado 

move alpine melt waters past sumps in cabbage deserts

end this beanfield war with gestures worthy of a grand mime. 

Marcel Marceau for our riparian rights 

 

Jeremiah Johnson for the defense. 

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in Canada. His latest book is Captain's Kismet (Alien Buddha, 2025).