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“How do you know what’s on the other side?”
—Alex Vartan Gubbins,
“just the flat snow of endurance”
—Ron Riekki,
“the poem where I am lit on fire and hauled up high in the air for all of Negaunee to see”
“The world heals”
—Jonathan Johnson,
Michigan to me is sometimes home
and sometimes a toilet
and sometimes where I had my first kiss
and sometimes is where I was attacked by a group of boys (on Croix Street—the goddamn nonstop violence of streets—the crucifixion in the name—like a Nail Road—a Suffering Street—a 39 Lashes Boulevard), with my collarbone shattered so that the doctor said if the bone shard had gone over a little bit more it could have punctured a lung and I could have died
and sometimes it’s a lake, a teal lake, a lake named Teal Lake, where I ached and hurt and cried and laughed and leaped and swam where I felt I was flying and flew off the rocks into the Negaunee water that was hotter than the air there and there were days I felt happy there
and sometimes felt horrid
and sometimes felt nothing,
numb
in the winters where it got so cold that the radio actually warned cows’ ears could freeze and break off
and summers warmed and saved me
and
often, no, every time I write I feel the pain in my shoulder
so pain, I suppose, should
enter into everything I write.
And it does.
For the last year, I’ve gone to every mass shooting in Michigan
and I’ll never do it again,
never go to a mass shooting
ever
again—
aging
with nothing to gain.
My insides deserted, tundraed, hurricaned,
sick with memory.
I did it because I was afraid of mass shootings.
In July of 2018, 8
years ago,
my girlfriend and I were looking online, deciding
if we should go to a Kite Festival or to a Garlic Festival.
We decided on the festival for kites, simply because it was closer,
and it was getting later,
and we’d only make the tail-end of the Garlic Festival,
so we went to the kites that were beautiful and boring
and I went to the water because the ocean was more beautiful, kites soaring
behind me as we looked out at the San Fran Bay water,
and we didn’t know,
but at the Garlic Festival
that we didn’t go to
a mass shooter opened fire on everyone there
with a semi-automatic rifle and AK-47,
39 rounds
firing into the food area,
reports that someone yelled to the shooter why he was doing the killings
and the mass murderer yelled back,
“Because I’m really angry.”
And America keeps getting angrier.
It feels like I have a bullet inside me.
It feels like there is a bullet in the center of the city where I live,
the city where the company where I work refuses to give any special accommodations
to the disabled,
because the company says, We see you as contractors
and not employees,
so you have no rights.
Yes,
it feels like there is a bullet in the forearm of
God.
In paramedic school, the instructor told us about the time he was shot,
and then asked if any of the students had ever been shot
and one student raised his hand
and told us what it’s like to be shot,
and then they taught us how to stop bleeding,
because, they said, this was Orlando.
And
in the last three days in Florida, 8 people have been shot. 4 dead. One of them a 4-year-old girl. And a 2-year-old girl injured. Less than a two-hour drive to Disney World from where they were shot.
And when I lived in Virginia,
in Charlottesville, I went to deliver a pizza
for my part-time job
and when I got to the trailer
someone yelled to open the door
and when I opened the door
the guy had a shotgun pointed at my chest.
He said he did it for a joke
“to see the expression on my face.”
I remember a Democrat in a social justice class saying in class
that Democrats need to start acting more like Republicans,
that Democrats need to be angrier.
It was a class where the teacher didn’t want to hear from me,
would purposely not call on me if I raised my hand, so I
learned ‘learned helplessness,’ helplessly
sitting there, thinking, no, we don’t need more anger,
thinking that I think it’s to love more.
I think.
This year I went to Enterprise to rent a car and the guy behind the counter called
me a misogynistic curse word I won’t use here, because it’s disgusting, his anger
that I wanted to rent a car on my birthday, angry, he said, that my license
would expire the next day, pissed off at me,
so strangely
angry
and inappropriately misogynistic,
and a kayaker was angry I was inner tubing on the river,
wanted only kayakers on the river
so he ran his kayak straight at me, puncturing my inner tube,
and a grocery store clerk, after I asked her how her day was going, telling me
a story of two customers who got in a fist fight in the line
to buy groceries,
and a woman shot in her right elbow last month, a 14-minute drive from where I live,
and when I was young
in Michigan
there was not one single road rage incident
I ever witnessed in my life
and
this month
I’ve seen two,
drivers driving
like they hate the world.
And I don’t know what’s happening.
A prisoner called me.
From prison.
I wasn’t sure if it was a mass shooter,
wanting to tell his story,
but I’m not interested in speaking with the mass shooters.
This year, I was interested in speaking with the survivors,
the resilient.
I’ll be honest: I’m afraid of this world. Very.
I contacted every single one of the Lansing city council members
after the Lansing mass shooting,
the secretary who answered my call telling me the council is “very”
interested in lessening gun violence.
Not one city council member called me back.
Not one.
In fact, I reached out to over a dozen gun violence reduction organizations this year.
Not one single one of them contacted me back,
except one,
that said they were “too busy”
to talk to me.
I previously went to a Republican meeting. Just to see what’s it’s like.
What it was like was organized.
What it was like was accepting.
There were shared beliefs in God,
shared beliefs in marriage,
shared beliefs in guns.
Shared beliefs I didn’t believe in,
didn’t share.
But they were shared
there.
The meeting went smoothly.
Everyone was on the same team.
And
I went to a Democrat meeting
to see what it was like.
It was chaos.
It was anger.
It was disarray.
Arguing.
It was walking on egg shells.
Your language had to be perfect or the room would flare up in anger.
It was cancel culture on top of cancel culture.
I couldn’t wait to leave
both
meetings.
I went to a gun violence organization meeting.
One of the big ones.
I won’t say the name.
But it felt tense.
I could tell one of the people there was some form of security,
pretending not to be,
but it was obvious.
At our table, I asked someone in the group
how the conversation about guns is complex.
They wanted to know what I meant.
I said that I’d looked up info and saw that more whites were killed by police in the last year—
and they interrupted and said that, no, percentage-wise, it was black people.
And I said percentage-wise, it listed, actually, indigenous people as the most disproportionately killed by police,
and then the table exploded.
Someone came over, said they were an organizer, and asked what I’d said
that had caused so much anger.
I restated it and she told me to never say that again, that it wasn’t what we were here for
and I asked her thoughts on it, if we need to complicate the discussion
and she told me, “Enough.”
Which was the slogan of the organization, a word on their shirts.
And I wonder if we can’t talk about guns.
So that’s why I wanted to talk about guns this year.
Because we can’t.
I’m not as afraid of mass shootings anymore.
I’ve gone to areas
with some of the highest crime rates in the U.S.
and asked the people there
if they’re afraid of mass shootings
and over and over
I’d hear, “No.”
I’d hear that you don’t get drunk, don’t get high, don’t hang around with
people who are drunk or high or both and who have guns.
But what about Garlic Festivals?
And Route 91 Harvest Music Festivals?
And Virginia Techs?
And Sandy Hooks?
And Orlando night clubs?
I’d quit being an EMT
right before the Orlando Pulse mass shooting.
2016. 107 people shot. A 20-minute drive to Disney.
I remember driving by that club
in the ambulance.
South Orange Ave. 11-minute drive from my company.
I remember one of the EMTs calling Florida
The Gunshine State.
I remember transporting gunshot victims,
How bullets enter everywhere,
Exit everywhere.
The randomness of it.
Who lives.
Who dies.
Roughly about 25% of gunshot victims die.
Unless if shot in the head.
Then roughly about 90% of them die.
Roughly.
I’ve talked to people who’ve been shot in the head.
Multiple.
Seen the scars.
I wonder what they were like before they were shot.
I quit the ambulance company right before the Pulse shooting,
otherwise, we’d have probably gone there.
I can’t imagine the Hell.
When I lived in Dearborn,
there was a guy killed for his watch at a restaurant a block from my apartment,
to the north.
And a driveby shooting at another restaurant a block from my apartment,
to the west.
And so I moved,
because the shootings were too close to my apartment.
I remember when I lived in Fort Myers, Florida. How frequent the gunshots were.
17 people shot in Fort Myers in the last year.
A shooting on Boy Scout Drive.
Yes, Boy Scout Drive.
And when I lived in Florida, a son murdered his father
in a house close to mine,
tried to bury his father in the backyard,
in the rain,
a neighbor looking out her window and seeing this.
Could you imagine looking out your window and seeing this?
And when I lived in Chicago, I remember talking to an extremely friendly theater artistic director who, less than a week later, would be murdered in his apartment.
And a murder in the apartment across the street from where a friend lived,
my friend pointing to which apartment it was.
I have no idea what’s so wrong with the world.
I wanted to be a Beat writer like Kerouac;
Instead, beat reporting.
Either way, I’m beat.
When I set out with the idea of going to every mass shooting in Michigan for a year,
often trying to get there as soon as I could after it happened,
even if the shooter hadn’t been caught,
I thought,
You know, I could be killed,
but I was called
to do it, honestly, even if it was painfully cold
on so many of those keelhauled nights where I could
have done something else, but I had no one.
The Garlic Festival took my girlfriend
in a way,
ex- now,
how
she was from France, found
America a bit disgusting, with its politics and violence
and violence and politics
and so she left
and I stayed.
Alone.
I have nothing
to lose
because I have
nothing.
I remember when I was a student at the University of Michigan
and I called in to get counseling
and the person on the other end of the phone made fun of me,
said in this mocking voice, “Oh, looks like someone needs a little attention.”
Honest to God.
This was a person in mental health care there.
I didn’t go.
I couldn’t get in anyway.
Wait lists that never end.
I’ve heard other complaints.
I went there, visited, recently, to see what kind of treatment I’d receive,
went to U of M’s Wellness Center
and the people there were rude,
telling me I had the wrong place,
just by looking at me,
judging I was too old
to be a student,
telling me this,
so I walked away
and thought of nontraditional students,
the discrimination of nontraditional students,
how often it’s later in life, maybe when you’re starting over, going to grad school, where you realize, ‘Well, maybe I should try therapy, it’ll be good for me,’ but then
to not be welcome.
Michigan is a nightmare.
Michigan is a struggle
and it’s coasting and floating on an inner tube on the Huron River when the people have faded behind me on the shore with their pot and loud music and barbecue smoke and their coughing and their laughing and
it’s the stillness of the river
where you float away
and the quiet comes
and the animals come out
on the shore
and the turtles on logs
and it’s so incredibly peaceful
and I look up at the sky
and God’s up there.
I’m sure of it.
God’s up there,
bleeding.
But God will survive
too.
And I thank God for every single person on this planet who’s kind.
I actually get a bit shocked nowadays when someone is kind to me.
I don’t expect it.
It jars me.
It reminds me of
goodness
and hope.
I hope Democrats start looking more to love,
and actually being brave enough to stop this gun epidemic, pandemic, disease, abuse.
The gun owners have blood on their hands, all.
Ha, they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
the multitudinous seas incarnadine,
making the green one red.
I truly hope and pray
That we’ll prioritize mental health for men.
I know. Again. Controversial to say.
The “manosphere” holds no air. Hypoxic masculinity. You die there.
What I’m talking about is the revelation that America creates mass shooters.
It manufactures them.
It manages to
mandate it.
It maneuvers everything in its power to ensure we have men who are so lost, so angry, so unheard, so abandoned, so abused that they feel they have to turn to horror, terror.
The news loves to talk about ‘veterans’ with mass shooters,
the news fetishizes that,
but ignores the poverty of the mass shooters,
the abuse, the neglect, the abandonment of their histories.
Why?
I’ve heard too many therapists say they won’t work with men as patients.
Whenever I hear that, I always think in the back of my mind,
‘You’re creating mass shooters.’
You can’t abandon men.
Otherwise, horror rises.
One out of every six men are victims of sexual violence.
Except I’ve heard it’s higher—that it’s actually one third of all men are victims of sexual violence.
I’ve attended hundreds of hours of in-person and online lectures and classes on trauma and violence and how we counsel survivors and the conversation ignores men. Always.
Always.
It just does.
I’m worried that there is so much violence against women
because there is so much violence against men
that no one seems to care about.
Loops loop.
Can I say this?
Can I say this if it will help?
If starting the conversation will help?
Help!
Online, I ask why there’s so much gun violence
and the responses are that it’s due to the alignment of some planet and some planet,
something like that, some astrology bullshit,
and someone else says something about prayer
and I’m disappointed, hoping for something real,
something specific, something accurate,
and I wonder if it’s too complex for social media
and it is.
After a year of doing this,
of talking to people
and searching
and researching
and analyzing
and reanalyzing
and thinking
and rethinking,
the issue of why we have so many mass shootings in America
is
the poverty
the racism
the absolutely inability to understand how violence/neglect/abuse affects men
the ridiculously sickening prevalence of guns
and the brutally difficult barriers to get mental health/therapy access.
And the complication that Republicans love guns, adore guns, are married to guns, brush their teeth with guns, shower with guns, make love to guns, kiss guns, kill with guns, drive guns, breathe guns, view stray bullets as the same as cigarette smoke (fuck if it harms other people)
and the complication that around 20% of Democrats own guns
and that it feels like Democrats are doing NOTHING to combat guns
that kill our children
more than anything else.
In the U.S., guns are made to kill children.
How can I say that?
Because that’s what they do.
Daily.
7 children killed by guns daily.
Daily.
Daily.
Daily.
If you’re a Democrat and you ever step foot into a Walmart,
you’re not a Democrat.
Do you know how many children have been killed by guns sold by Walmart?
Ban Walmart for life.
The store has blood all over its everything.
Bloodart.
Walblood.
Blood on its shampoo.
Power adapter blood.
Credit card blood.
Blood on its stacking mugs.
Dehumidifier blood.
Ice maker blood.
Water slide blood.
Blood bratwurst.
Ragdoll blood.
Blood Walton.
That’s it.
This is the end.
It’s been a year.
Seventeen mass shootings in Michigan.
In the last three days, we’ve had shootings in Jackson, Detroit, and Flint.
That’s impressive for Michigan, to only have three shootings in three days.
It’s usually more.
In the last three days, there’s only been one mass shooting in the U.S. In Chicago.
At a gas station.
Where so many of the shootings were this year.
Guns.
Gas.
Gaza.
Guns.
Gas.
Gaza.
.
To the truly kind people of this world,
you are saving us
from Hell.
You are giving us glimpse of Heaven.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Editor’s note: Ron Riekki covered every mass shooting in Michigan from July 2025 until today for The New Verse News.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
