SEARCHING FOR A PRAYER

by Jacqueline Jules

400 Rounds of Ammunition Found at Pawnshop Connected to N.J. Killings: The police arrested the owner of the store in Keyport, N.J., on criminal weapons charges. [Their search] on Friday night … yielded six rifles, three handguns and one shotgun, in addition to the ammunition rounds, including hollow point bullets, which expand when they hit a target, according to officials. Three of the weapons were AR-15 style assault rifles, the same type of firearm used in the Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and Parkland mass shootings. —The New York Times, December 15, 2019

When the news buzzed on my phone:
6 Dead in Jersey City. Jewish Kosher Deli,
I was googling, searching for a prayer
to read Friday night at our yearly service
to remember the dead at Sandy Hook
with an invited speaker
who would tell our congregation
how little progress has been made
since those babies were gunned down
with the same kind of rifles
carried inside a kosher market
at the very moment I was searching
for a prayer, not too political
to read from the pulpit
at a service organized to keep
the memory of innocents alive.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, Rise Up Review and Gargoyle. She lives in Arlington, Virginia. 

THE BRING OF DISASTER

by Mark Williams

O Heavenly Father,

It’s me again Austin Baggerly. I cant talk long tonight.
Mom says to say my prayers and get to sleep pronto
cause Dad got me home late. Home to my house
where he used to live but now is just Mom and me
and my box turtle Bradley. But you know that.
Pastor Crandall says you know everything there is.
He says You are Omniportant. Everyother Sunday Dad
takes me to praise You at Sudden Glory Fellowship.
Pastor Crandall says You made our President President.
Pastor Crandall says our President is The Chosen One.
Mom says that The Chosen One destroyed her marriage
and that if you chose him then you must want
to take everyone to the bring of disaster.
Why do You want to bring us there? For instants why
did You choose someone who does not care
if the world gets too hot for us to live? Where will we go?
And why did You pick someone who lets fires
burn up all the trees and forest animals
that You made in the Beginning? Plus why
is it OK to let people buy guns to shoot me in school?
Mom says the President wants to build a wall
to keep out poor people so they can stay poor
in there poor countrys? Why would You God
want to keep people poor in poor countrys
when You cared for the birds in the air
before the President let them burn up in the forests?
Maybe You chose someone to bring us to disaster
so that next time when it is our turn to choose
we will choose someone who stops us
before going all the way in to it. But in my pinion
You are cutting it awful close. Dear God,
when I turn ten will all this make sense? I hope so.
Sometimes I wish I could pull in my head like Bradley.

                                                            Amen

Mark Williams lives in Evansville, Indiana. His poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. His poems in response to the current administration have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, and Tuck Magazine. This is his fourth appearance in TheNewVerse.News.

SCHOOL SHOOTING IN CALIFORNIA

by Rachel Mallalieu




School Shooting in California
briefly topped my computer screen last Thursday.
The numbers didn’t add up—
     only two children died.
The headline quickly fell below more pressing news.

I didn’t argue with my dad.
The carnage wasn’t grand enough
to warrant our familiar discussion.
I usually recount the horrors I’ve seen in the ER.
He quips that more gun laws
won’t change outcomes.
I remind him that I’m out of school;
he’ll never know what it feels like
to pray every day
     that your child comes home.
I rarely finish this last sentence
because my throat seizes and I
stop before I cry.

On Thursday, my children had
     active shooter training.
The  school sent the email weeks ago.
Don’t worry, there will be no pretend
active shooter, no “gun,”
no simulated injury scenes.

My second grader cried
before bed. He says he can’t go to
college because someone might shoot
him there. He intends to live
with me forever.
The fourth grader was unbothered. He
learned to stay quiet, put paper
over the windows and barricade the door.
He is certain rules will save him.
The sixth grader was quiet.
He only wondered which classmate might
bring a gun to school.
The ninth grader, an old hand, did not
mention the training.
He scanned the news on his phone.
Hey Mom, did you see there was another
school shooting?
     Only two students died.

Editor’s note: Rachel’s poem recalls the Saugus High School shooting that happened on November 14. As we go to press, there is news from Union City about a shooting on Saturday, November 23: Two boys, 11 and 14, killed in shooting in elementary school parking lot in California.

Rachel Mallalieu is an Emergency Physician and mother of five. She writes poetry in her spare time. Her work has been featured in TheNewVerse.News, Blood and Thunder and is upcoming in Haunted Waters Press.

WAYNE LAPIERRE

by Mark Danowsky

Illustration by Tony Calabro

The world is on fire
so fire back

Fire before fire can be declared

Fire before anyone can shout fire

whether the building is crowded
or otherwise

Shout fire, fire, fire
in the hole
Fore!

Man down
Woman down
Child down

down child down

Who else is left down?

You know who
is cowering in the bathtub
fearful of a stray
bullet in the brain
Wayne saw John
Wayne or The Baptist

Showed him The Way

Fear, Love

the world becomes
a scary place

Wayne at night

his family in harm’s way

he prays for them

prays for us

pray we understand why

why guns save
not shatter
lives of a feather


collapse us with shards

a million little pieces of shrapnel

 Wayne, god
can’t you see

the rest of us shot thru

bleeding out


Mark Danowsky is a poet / writer from Philadelphia and author of the poetry collection As Falls Trees (NightBallet Press, 2018). He’s Managing Editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal.

THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE

by Pepper Trail

Photo Illustration by Lyne Lucien/The Daily Beast

"The new [Endangered Species Act] rules also give the government significant discretion in deciding what is meant by the term “foreseeable future." 

—The New York Times, August 12, 2019

The Administration has announced that the following are no longer to be considered part of the “foreseeable future:”

Ice for polar bears to stand on
Safe and legal abortions
The concept of objective facts
Efforts to reduce the burning of fossil fuels
An act of political independence by any Republican member of Congress
Revulsion against separating immigrant children from their mothers and imprisoning them
Glaciers in Glacier National Park
Condemnation of white nationalism by the President of the United States
Any evidence of compassion or empathy from the President of the United States
Elephants
Nuclear arms control
The languid flight of monarch butterflies over a summer meadow
The survival of human civilization

However, the White House assures anxious Americans that the following can still be relied upon:

Inaction on gun control
Unrestricted influence of money on politics
Uncontrolled corporate power

Be sure to visit this site for regular updates


Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

JUST A NORMAL HIGH SCHOOL LOCKDOWN

by Ed Gold

In the fifties, in first grade,
I learned that crouching under my desk
would protect me from the blast
of an atomic bomb,
dropped on the playground.

In the sixties, in seventh grade,
I learned that when a knife is pulled
anywhere near me to run
and not look back.
But I never saw a gun.

Today, in twelfth grade,
my niece has learned the protocol
for when the shooter enters,
texting her parents every five minutes
so they know she is still alive.

She wears a bullet-blocking backpack
her mother ordered on the internet
pricier than the bullet-resistant model.
It won't protect her from an assault rifle,
but every little bit helps.

Ed Gold is originally from Baltimore, got an M.A. from the writing seminars at Hopkins, taught poetry at U of Md for years, and is now down in Charleston, SC, writing happily and madly. He has one chapbook, Owl, and about 80 poems published in TheNewVerse.News, Kakalak, Ekphrastic Review, Window Cat Press, Rat’s Ass Review, Cyclamens and Swords, and elsewhere. Active in the Poetry Society of South Carolina, he runs the Skylark Contest for high-school poets and co-chairs its two-week poetry series at the Dock Street Theater for Piccolo Spoleto in Charleston. 

HIJACKED

by Karen Neuberg

Demonstrators assemble outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in Louisville. (Luke Sharrett/Getty Images via The Washington Post, August 7, 2019)

A breakdown, as in
corruption,

mind-feed, firearm soul.
We can’t get

the automatic
weapons

out of our hands.
The ability

to think
taken over

and with it
ourselves. What’s

it called
when democracy dies.

It’s called
my country.

Karen Neuberg is a Brooklyn-based poet. Her full length collection Pursuit is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her latest chapbook is the elephants are asking (Glass Lyre Press, 2018). Her poems have previously appeared in TheNewVerse.News. She is associate editor of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East.

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.

YES, THEY SOW GUNS INTO THE BELLY OF THIS WORLD

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker





You cannot sow leaves back to a tree,
unpluck the plume of an eagle.
When words begin to rot the tongue,
those words cannot be swallowed back.

There is a dish to hold the sea,
a brassiere to hold the sun,
a compass for the galaxy,
a voice to wake the dead.

But this is the silence between us.
And this is why there will be no nest.
Because this is a relationship
between a bird & a gun.

Shots burst out into a crowd;
and, we saw the red-hot glint,
watching & crying & asking
that question over again.

Talons fall from the sky,
settle, & turn to rust. I hate you,
I think, as you shoot me
to death with a rifle in my face:

Born to pull the trigger.
Born to light the match.
Born to see the blood.
Born to steal the hope.

You feel rage & there are bodies
on the floor, me, dying,
almost dead, knees stuck
together with feathers & blood.

One gun to hold the bullets;
one finger to pull the trigger.
Truth wears everyday clothes.
Tufts crimson as sunset pass us by.


Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

FUCK YOUR GUN!

by Scott C. Kaestner






Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a 6 year old child’s right to enjoy a festival with the family.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a family’s right to go grocery shopping on a Saturday morning.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede an adult’s right to enjoy a night out with friends.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a student’s right to get an education without having to attend classmates' funerals.

Fuck your gun, your right to carry it does not supersede a believer’s right to worship the God they choose.

Fuck your gun, fuck the NRA, fuck your thoughts and prayers, fuck the cowardly thieves who represent us.

Fuck your gun!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, dad, husband, and guy who never gets tired of sunshine or tacos. Google ‘scott kaestner poetry’ to peruse his musings and doings.

IT'S A SIGN

by Jean Varda




It’s a sign, the black charred ground
the empty space where ponderosa,
cedar and oaks once stood tall and stately
It’s a sign, the sparseness of insects
and birds, the temperatures
unbearably hot or unbearably cold
It’s a sign, the school shootings
the police killings of unarmed men, the
families at the border being separated
from their children and turned away
as they flee violence and are only
faced with more. It’s a sign when more
people are pushing shopping carts
on the street then shopping carts in the
store or sleeping by the river in tents
and makeshift shelters.
It’s a sign when artificial intelligence
has taken over almost everything we do
and children stare into digital screens
every chance they get. It’s a sign when
the highest death rate is due to suicide
and drugs, when a nineteen year old
kills herself because she cannot bear
the guilt and pain of having watched
her best friend die in a massacre at
her school. It’s a sign when children
are the ones gathering by the millions
in the nation’s capital to ask the adults
to do something about the semi
automatic weapons that killed their
friends. And when children sit in offices
of politicians begging them to pass
legislation on the environmental
emergency so they have a future on
this shrinking planet when they
should be playing hopscotch
                                and eating jelly beans, it’s a sign.  

Jean Varda gave her first poetry reading at Stone Soup Gallery in Boston Mass. Presented by Poet Jack Powers. This was followed by performances on street corners, prisons and churches with her mentor story teller Brother Blue. Then to San Francisco to join Kush with Cloud House, and the largest collection of San Francisco Beat poets on film. She has published six chapbooks of poetry, establishing Sacred Feather Press. She started four open mics, taught poetry writing workshops, hosted a radio show, was nominated for a pushcart prize. All while raising two daughters and working as a Hospice nurse. She now resides Chico, CA where she works as a nurse and a collage artist. 

FLY IT AT HALF-MAST ALWAYS

by Rick Kempa

"The New Normal" by Pat Bagley

A few AP headlines, January 27, 2019:

Search on for Louisiana man suspected in 5 deaths

1 dead, 1 wounded after shooting near Atlantic City

Police: 5 people shot overnight at Indianapolis bar

Teen arrested in shooting death of another Blue Springs MO teen

MSU police: Woman shoots herself at campus shooting range

Reno police: Man killed when shot multiple times in vehicle

New Haven Police investigate shooting of pizza delivery man

Fly it at half-mast always
because we are never done grieving,
because, one by one by one,
we are killing each other daily.

Fly it at half-mast
to declare our permanent sorrow,
the holes in our hearts, the horror
that we are no longer horrified.

Fly it to mark the fallen,
yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s,
ten thousand exes on the streets,
a million feet of crime scene tape.

Because we are willing to sacrifice
our neighbors, our children
to defend our right to own,
to be killing machines,

because we fall so short of what we
could be and refuse to be, because
our numbness is complicity,
fly it at half-mast always.

Poet and essayist Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he has recently finished his thirtieth and final year of teaching at Western Wyoming College. Other work of his on the themes of social justice and the lack thereof has appeared in Haight-Ashbury Review, Los Angeles Review, Little Patuxent Review, The J Journal, and elsewhere. His latest poetry collection is Ten Thousand Voices (Oakland: Littoral Press). 

A MOTHER'S LAMENT FOR AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

by Shirley J. Brewer




Gun shots punctuate country music.
An endless series of ragged wounds
ruin amber waves of grain.

A damaged boy in black
takes aim behind his killer toy.
Gone our purple mountain majesties.

All the years I spent nurturing my child
dissolve in puddles of blood.
America! America!

Without solace, alone I become
a maternal vigilante.
Till all success be nobleness
and ev’ry gain divine.

A grieving parent, I want to destroy
weapons of rage throughout this land.
Oh, beautiful for heroes proved
in liberating strife.

My mission: Annihilate the guns.
Let the alabaster cities gleam
undimmed by human tears.

My child’s life matters.
Will you help me, please?
America? America?
From sea to shining sea.

Shirley J. Brewer serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore, MD. Recent poems appear in Barrow Street, Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Passager, Poetry East, Slant, and other journals. Shirley’s books include A Little Breast Music (2008), After Words (2013), and Bistro in Another Realm (2017).

TO THE POLITICIAN WITH A MICROPHONE DRIBBLING THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS

by Tricia Knoll





I have my hand up in your face, you crazy motherfucker!
I do not want your prayers and thoughts.
Yes, my son was inside that school. Drawing peonies.

What did you say? I said it was my son dancing
in that bar. I’m sick of your platitudes and droopy eyelids.
He was line dancing and you tap dance about amendments.

He was in the yoga studio doing sun salutes.
That’s what I said and yes, I’m yelling at you.
He was stretching for breath to live in peace.

Yes, he was at Shabbat. Next to his grandmother.
And at the Baptist church. And the nursing home.
And the trucking office. And the Waffle Company.

And you’re out here with your microphone
crooning what a terrible shame
that so many people suffer mental illness

and that your people, the ones in their desks
piled with law books, are going for the death penalty
as if that says something other than you don’t know

nothing. This shooter shot himself.
And I don’t want the other ones
dead, I want them loved by someone

and I want YOU to stop making it sooooo easy
for them to buy the guns that make every
single room in this country dangerous to be alive.

We are all in this together. I was there too.
So was my neighbor and his daughter.
And his neighbor in the wheelchair.

Where were you? Playing golf?


Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet living in a quiet woods.

TRADING FLESH FOR METAL

by Austin Davis

On Monday, police said [Matthew] Edwards shot and killed his wife and their three children — Jacob, 6; Brinley, 4; and Paxton, 3—before turning the gun on himself. The family instantly became five of the 1,200-some people killed that way each year in the United States. —delaware online, July 12, 2018


House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill. —Politico, July 11, 2018

I.

I realized that poems nowadays
are measured by the lull between bullets
instead of a lover’s heartbeat
after I got my haircut at Supercuts
by a woman with a Pink Lady Handgun
staring me down from her hip.
The woman looked as if
she’d been attacked on her way to work
by the bubblegum monster
I used to draw on all my math homework
but she had a smile on her face,
something that was missing from me.

It’s SO CHIC—
my husband makes me take it
with me wherever I go
and at first I was against it
but then I got used to it
and now I feel SOOOOOO
safe and protected
and are you okay
because you look a little bit like
a skydiver wearing a paper parachute
who just noticed
he was a foot from the ground.

II.

Well, last year I had a vase
thrown at my head in Greer, Arizona
after I told a white man in white pants
that he was cleaning his assault rifle
as if it was a porcelain doll
because he felt naked without it,
not because of his OCD.
I told him that keeping
his bullets in a different room
could never stop them from crawling
under his pillow every night

and if I wasn’t holding his gun right then,
the man would have shot me
and ended my life right there.
One moment would have shattered
into a million, but instead,
there was a silence
deeper than any grave.

The crickets outside
went back to their small talk,
the trees held back their laughter,
and the scared old man
cried with his head on my shoulder
until morning.

III.

During March for Our Lives
almost a month ago
I watched Donald T***p
ride his motorcycle
to his Palm Beach Golf Course
and complain about
those young, idiot protesters
over a little wine and cheese
when just four years ago,
T***p had accused Obama
of “playing golf on the job.”

IV.

If saving 600 women
from being killed every year
because their insecure boyfriends
are overcompensating
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we need to change
T***p’s job description
from ‘President’ to ‘orange cement.’

If standing between 2,555 children
and the bullet their fathers
forgot was in the rifle
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think someone better add
“20% chance of death”
to the weather forecast
on the school announcements
every morning.

If preventing 13,000 homicides
and giving more than 35,000
Americans another day
to tell their girlfriends and boyfriends,
wives and husbands, sisters and brothers,
and mothers and fathers
that they love them
isn’t “part of the job,”
then I think we’re just letting
those who are malnourished of power
but are the least suited to hold it
trade our human flesh for metal.

Austin Davis is a poet, writer, and spoken word artist from Mesa, Arizona. Austin's poetry has been widely published in literary journals and magazines, both in print and online. Most recently, Austin's work can be found in Pif Magazine, Ink in Thirds, Folded Word, The Poetry Shed, In Between Hangovers, One Sentence Poems, and Tuck Magazine. Austin’s first chapbook The Moon and Her Ocean was published in 2017 by Fowlpox Press. Cloudy Days, Still Nights, Austin’s first full length book of poetry, was published in May, 2018 by Moran Press.

CALLING THE ROLL

by Pamela L. Sumners

'Black lives don't matter,' lawyer says after jury awards $4 in police killing. —CNN, June 1, 2018. According to Lawyer John M. Phillips, Greg Hill “opened and closed his garage door deescalating the situation. Police shot through his closed garage door.” —CBS, June 1, 2018. Photo at the gofundme designed to provide for Greg Hill’s children.

Let me be the curator on the day
In the long hot summer
When all hell breaks loose.
Someone needs to be in charge.

Ferguson!  Hands up or I’ll shoot.
Don’t think I won’t do it, either.
Charleston!  Stop crying.
You put that thing down right now
Or I’ll give you something to cry about.

San Bernardino, you’re in time out.
Go to your mat.  Baton Rouge!
Redstick—go get me your switch.
Orlando, I told you you’d get burned
If you touched that.  I told you
A burned child dreads the fire.

All of you!  Back up.  Get down.
Show of hands.  Show me your hands.
Keep everything where I can see it.
Dallas—Dallas, now what did I tell you
About parade routes and snipers?

Pay attention.  Listen.  Settle down,
All of you.  Use your indoor voice
But use your words.  You have to
Use your words.  Meantime, what
We need—are you listening to me?
is a little
order
here . . .

Pamela L. Sumners is a civil rights and constitutional lawyer who writes poems. She lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage kid, several dogs, and unwanted mice.

ALL FALL DOWN

by j.lewis

thoughts and prayers
get in the way so often now
it's hard to know when to think
and when to pray, or think about praying
or pray about thinking
as if the mere voicing
of the thoughtless prayer
or the prayerless thought
could make anything at all
better than bleeding kids

bleeding kids, kids bleating
parkland comes to mind
as the survivors don't just think
and don't just pray
but stand and challenge aloud
the bleating politicians
who thoughtlessly offer
through hypocritical lips
a silent prayer that they will not
have to stand up, stand against
their donors, take a stand
and watch the campaign coffers bleed

bleeding coffers, coffins bearing
faces bled white against white satin pillows
as if the pain of separation from life
could be soothed by the softness
smoothed by the softly falling tears
tears that tear apart the future
the past, the present as though
thoughts and prayers were knives
hurled against a wall of inaction
politics—inaction in action

guns in action, bolt action
action figures, police reaction
but not until the blood has spilled
thoughts, prayers, blood spilling
every day, every classroom

classes, classes, we all fall down

j.lewis is a Nurse Practitioner who has seen far too much violence in his lifetime to be quiet in the face of the disgrace of unchecked gun deaths in America.

7000 PAIRS OF SHOES

by David Spicer

You rest on the Capitol lawn

silent as the senators and congressmen

who ignore you and your former owners

you’re there protesting inaction and corruption

your owners’ names on placards near you

stay on that ground as long as you can

call for your owners to resurrect from the dead

to inhabit you to haunt the bought and paid for politicians

who blame mental illness local cops

unarmed teachers anything but the weapons

yes let their invisible feet wear you again

fly into the sky an invisible insurrection of gentle avengers

every time you see one of the lawmakers strolling down

Pennsylvania Avenue or the steps of the granite

gun church tell the ghosts to slap one of them

on his head knock some compassion into his apathy

perform aerial demonstrations guided by the ghosts

of the 7000 children and of teachers concertgoers,

dancers housewives grandmothers bus drivers

7000 pairs of you all colors and kinds red sneakers brown

slippers blue high heels yellow loafers white crocs

remain together escape from the hired sanitation workers

paid to collect you gather by the Potomac don’t let them

find you and diminish your power no transform your cloth

skin your rubber soles your canvas faces your leather toes

into new life defy science defy reality band together perform miracles

speak for the dead speak for their ghosts speak for future ghosts

oh shoes what will become of you don’t let them take you away

don’t let anybody dump you in the latest landfill and forget about you

whisper shout mutter sing yell into enough ears of enough saviors

who will pick you up and save you for another demonstration

on another lawn at the capitol of a state until you convince

the crooked men with their crooked souls and their crooked suits

to do something to do anything to stop stop stop their crooked silence

until you find more and more shoes thousands of more shoes hundreds

of thousands of more shoes who will join you and join an army

that cannot be stopped an army of 7000000 ghosts of 70000000

ghosts of victims who cannot speak anymore cannot laugh anymore

cannot run anymore cannot enjoy a day with cousins at a picnic on a lawn

much like the capitol lawn cannot return the smile of an infant

because two of the shoes are hers cannot think of a time

when guns didn’t exist cannot live in a land of guns any longer

David Spicer has poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Reed Magazine, Raw, The Ginger Collect, Yellow Mama, Ploughshares, The New Verse News, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks; his latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree, available from Flutter Press.

ONE QUESTION FOR SOMEONE WHO OWNS GUNS

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman

Image from The Trace.

                what        and       who
                would you be
                if tomorrow
                all   guns      vanished
                like     children   who   died    in schools


Sister Lou Ella Hickman is a poet, writer, and a certified spiritual director.  Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines such as First Things, Emmanuel, Third Wednesday, and TheNewVerse.News.  Her first book of poetry was entitled she: robed and wordless.

BIRDSONG

by Bunkong Tuon

Abby Spangler and her sixteen year-old daughter Eleanor Spangler Neuchterlein hold hands as they participate in a "lie-in" during a protest in favor of gun reform in front of the White House, Monday, Feb. 19, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) via Boston Herald.

Here, in the Northeast,
There is snow on the frozen ground.
Birds are flying from the South,
Crying madly in the mourning sky.
A man with a gun is hunting them.
The branches shake against
My bedroom window.
Their song is plaintive,
Sad, and urgent.
My glass window will shatter
If nothing is to be done.
They sing about a teacher
Crouching in the broom closet
With her high school students.
A survivor says afterward,
“First we thought it was firecrackers.
Then my friends fell down,
One by one.”
They sing about the adults
Behaving like children,
Taking no responsibility
To protect the young.
They sing about the children
Acting like adults
Marching to that great mansion,
Lying on cold concrete,
Eyes closed.  Some held hands,
Others over their chests,
As if caught dead in prayer.

Bunkong Tuon is the author of Gruel (2015) and And So I Was Blessed (2017), both poetry collections published by NYQ Books.  He's also a contributor to Cultural Weekly.