THIS IS NOT A GUN

by Mary K O'Melveny

                        …El Paso (this time)


This is a video game gone quite wrong.
This is a prayer turned to a theme song.
This is a mental health problem.  A strong
response will allow us to move along.

This is a city where migrants have long
been welcome, in serape or sarong,
where border crossers shop for daylong
Walmart bargains—our US torch song.

They sell weapons there too that stoke real fears—
bumpstocks and bullets and bandoliers.
But apparently all is not as it appears,
even as these are checked out by cashiers.

The enabler-in-chief and all his peers
report that we must cover up our ears.
The silencing of rifles would set back years
of cold cash from NRA financiers.

Republicans, whose loyalty is owed
to makers of shiny things that explode,
hide from the press as the mark is towed
while innocents reap what their greed has sowed.

Where bones have shattered and blood has flowed,
these folks blather past each grim episode.
Their words are camouflaged in secret code
while still more angry white men lock and load.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses will be published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

RED FLAG

by Tricia Knoll

You stepped in the doorway.
Come, you said, to comfort me.

A long way to come without
having gone anywhere new,

I thought, the nurse watched
over me to help me contain

my anger, but I could not.
The background: strangers

arrived to check out a victim.
Such a long way to come

without moving an inch.
My fingers searched

for a red flag to hold up
when I spit out

ban assault rifles,
don’t let white men

use them as banners
for hate.

The hate you wave
at every turn.


Tricia Knoll asks how she might feel if she were in a hospital bed after a shooting and the President arrived.

TRES Y VEINTIDOS AND NINE

Samuel Klug, left, and John Neff visit a memorial at the scene of a mass shooting in the city's historic Oregon District in Dayton, Ohio. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

1

Tres personas fueron asesinadas en Gilroy, California

Trevor Irby—Stephen Romero—Keyla Salazar

2

Veintidós personas fueron asesinadas en El Paso, Texas

Jordan Anchondo—Andre Anchondo—Arturo Benavidez—Javier Rodriguez—Sara Esther Regalado Moriel—Adolfo Cerros Hernández—Gloria Irma Marquez—María Eugenia Legarreta Rothe—Ivan Manzano—Juan de Dios Velázquez Chairez—David Johnson—Leonardo Campos Jr.—Maribel Campos—Angelina Silva Englisbee—Maria Flores—Raul Flores—Jorge Calvillo Garcia—Alexander Gerhard Hoffman—Luis Alfonzo Juarez-Elsa Mendoza de la Mora—Margie Reckard—Teresa Sanchez

3

Nine people were killed in Dayton Ohio

Megan Betts—Monica Brickhouse—Nicholas Cumer—Derrick Fudge—Thomas J. McNichols—Lois Oglesby—Saeed Saleh—Logan Turner—Beatrice Warren-Curtis