WHIRLS

by Don Kingfisher Campbell

Click to read article and view video.

1: California Driveway

 

The unfurling of the calla lily

Like a white dress whirling

 

When fully open with the day

Orange pistil elicits pollination

 

2: Minnesota Video

 

Masked man’s bodycam sees driver:

“I’m not mad at you, boy.”

 

Nearby woman wielding cellphone:

“You want to come at us?”

 

3: Reflecting Poet

 

The whirl of wheels

The whirl of a weapon

 

What makes a mind whirl

What made our minds whirl

Don Kingfisher Campbell, MFA Antioch University L.A., taught at USC and Occidental College Upward Bound, board member California Poets In The Schools, publisher Four Feathers Press, host of the Saturday Afternoon Poetry reading and workshop series in Pasadena, California.

NINE DEAD IN DAYTON

by Martin H. Levinson

Map of the 2,162 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. —Vox

twenty-two in El Paso, twenty-one
in San Ysidro, forty-nine in Orlando,
fourteen in San Bernardino,
fifty-eight by a Las Vegas casino,
a crowd of concertgoers,
bodies lying bleeding, a
nation that is reeling, the
core of who we are, posting
hate, loading up, firing fast
and down they go in Walmarts,
at festivals, inside of schools,
inside of bars, one hundred
rounds a minute, death is a
democracy, knows no color,
knows no sex, equality for
all, bullets pierce pliant flesh,
splinter bones, don’t tread on
me the gun nuts say, Columbine
and Parkland, Sandy Hook,
Aurora, thoughts and prayers,
fictitious care, death and
dying everywhere.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

AMERICA: MISBEGUN

by Ron Riekki

for Gregory Orr

“Law Enforcement is at the scene of shootings in Gilroy, California. 

Reports are that shooter has not yet been apprehended.

Be careful and safe!”

—tweet by T***p, July 29, 2019

“Which amendment?

The Second.

Number two?

Yeah.

Like number two?  Like going number two?

Yeah.”

—conversation overheard on Bay Area Rapid Transit line

“During the Civil War, poetry didn’t just respond to events; it shaped

them.”

—Ruth Graham, "A 'Poetry-Fueled' War"

and the shape of the U.S. right now is a toilet,
or a gun,
a toilet-gun,
toilet=gun,

and—swear to God—

this morning
my girlfriend asked me if I wanted to go to the Garlic Festival in Gilroy
or the Kite Festival in Berkeley
and we chose the Kite Festival
because it was closer
and after 5pm, when the massive whale kite was lowering,
the kite she said she loved,
it was the same moment when
another shooter—
and there are so many shooters now—
here,
in the U.S.,
because this is T***p’s U.S. now—
let’s call him T.P. for short—
T.P.’s U.S.,
which resembles the worst horror of Peele’s Us,

violence as normal,

and be afraid when

violence is normal,

and we need to repeal

and I’m tired of the violence

and the White House is filling with ghosts,
all of the ghosts
of those
shot and killed

and in EMT school, the best student in the class had a kid who was shot,
a child who was shot,
in Orlando
and she did CPR in the back of the ambulance
and the boy did not live
and she left
the class, because she couldn’t take the violence of America,

and this was a few years before the Pulse nightclub shooting,
which my old ambulance unit helped at—
with 49 killed, 53 wounded,

and I had a guy pull out a gun on me
when I was delivering pizzas
in Charlottesville
because he thought it would be funny
to see my expression
and my expression
was nothing

because my counselor asked,
“Have you ever had a weapon pulled on you?”
And I said, “Yes”
And she said, “When?”
And I said, “Multiple times,”
And she said, “Like when?”
And I said, “Do you want me to list all of them?”

And I had a student at Auburn
who told me he used to get down low
and shoot his gun
so that he’d try to skip the bullet
ever so gently along the water
and I asked him if he thinks he could have killed someone
doing that
and he said, “No, of course not”

and the gun that was pulled out after the basketball game

and the time in Detroit when the guys who were all in line
started sharing their bullet holes,
pulling up shirts and pant legs

and the guy in class who said he shot himself once by mistake
and he can still feel the bullet under his skin
and someone asked, “Didn’t they take it out?”
and he said, “No,”

and the guy who pulled out a gun at a party
and said, “Relax, it’s not loaded”

and my old poetry teacher
in Virginia
who told the class that he shot and killed his brother
by mistake
when they were both little boys

and the guy from my Religious Studies class
at Central Michigan University
who showed me he keeps a gun under his couch
and he slid the gun back under the cushions
and tried to start talking about God again
but God was overshadowed by the gun
where I couldn’t think about God anymore,
just about what direction the gun was pointed right now.

Ron Riekki’s most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

THE MOON'S SURFACE

by Austin Alexis


Devastated long ago by asteroids,
and now stark—
a grim, gray landscape filled with unease.
That's the damn sad moon in bereavement,
resembling the American spirit
after one-too-many catastrophes:
a harbor blasted by bombs dropped from the sky;
a mass shooting
and then another, another;
an attack—terrorist or otherwise—
on a random June morning.
Ragged, scarred, the moon replicates the American soul
stumbling from one tragedy to another,
another, and the another.



Austin Alexis's full-length collection is Privacy Issues (Broadside Lotus Press, 2014).  He has poetry and fiction most recently in the anthology Rabbit Ears: TV Poems and in the journals Home Planet News, J Journal, TheNewVerse.News, and Chiron Review. 

AFTER ORLANDO

by Jim Gustafson

Khartoon! by KhalidAlbaih #Orlando Shooter is A Muslim #Trump #ISIS

Is it too soon to comment?
This morning I read 20 killed, now 49.
I feel no different. I have grown numb
to numbers. One or 49, too many,
and always the guns. I prayed
let the shooters name be Smith or Jones,
thinking that might slow the swelling
hate that now will surely come.
This world is no different than the world
of The Book, the one we share.
How dare anyone make a fool a norm,
and the misguided an example.
But they will come now shouting,
“I told you so.” They will use the spent shell
casings to build their case.
How strange I was to think it could be
other than what it is.

Jim Gustafson holds a M. Div. from Garrett Theological Seminary in his home town of Evanston, Illinois and an MFA from the University of Tampa. He is the author of two previous books, a chapbook Driving Home, (Aldrich Press, 2013), and a collection of essays Take Fun Seriously (Limitless Press, 2008). His collection Drains and Other Depressions will be available from Big Table Publishing in early 2017.

JUNE 12, 2016: WHO COUNTS

by James M. Croteau

New Orleans firefighters in 1973 assisting a patron of the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar that had been set on fire. Thirty-two people died in the attack. AP Photo via The New York Times, June 13 2016

We skipped Pride to pack
for our annual Maine trip.
We left about 7AM and
on the on-ramp to I-94
we first heard:

at least 20 dead and 42 injured,
another shooting, Orlando,
a nightclub. This will be
our 27th trip  to Ogunquit.
Our first was 31 years ago.

We've never been there with
the right to be married. We
stopped for lunch just past 1 o'clock
at a Panera east of Cleveland.
I walked our dogs. My partner

went to get food. He returned
with 50 dead and 53 injured, and
at a gay bar. I google news from my iPhone--
the largest mass shooting in US history.
I also know it's the largest mass killing

of LGBT people in US history because
only five years ago I learned of the story
of Upstairs Lounge arson in New Orleans
during Pride month 43 years ago. It took
16 minutes to extinguish the fire and 32

of our lives. I turned to Facebook  feeling
my stolen youth raw and inflamed
again. I get reminded of Wounded Knee.
The biggest depends on how and who
defines what.  The army, with the

semi-automatic weapons of 1890,
massacred at least 150, maybe 300
people. I'll be 60 in three months.
It's near 4, and we're at a toll booth
near the outskirts of Buffalo.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 31 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the U.S. south in the 60s and 70s and his writing often reflects that experience. His poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Right Hand Pointing, Queer South: LGBTQ Writers on the American South and Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry among others. His first chapbook will be published by Redbird Chapbooks in 2016. 

PIGGY BACK

by Robert Carr 

Mommy, I’m frightened, Sunday morning
as I reach for my pretty, the beaded strings
I hide in a jar. Mommy I love you
There’s a noise rat-tatting in my head.

It pops, repetitive, like skulls beneath a tire, a 911
voice compressing sound into solid. I hold
a steering wheel caught up in a Pulse, In club they
shooting, in broken maricόn light, in butterfly wing

soft eye-shadow – I imagine two toddlers
wobbling, one pink, one blue, diaper-clad,
running a median, dysphoric in Orlando
along a broken – white – line. U ok

If I wasn’t fucked for being pussy I would slam
my break, hit hazards, drop to a knee on asphalt, hold
them equally, urge them gently – Trapp in bathroom

Set your burned soles in the squat of my hips,
climb on my shoulders, together we’ll make
a larger shadow as we stand.

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, a chapbook published in 2016 by Indolent Books. His poems are published in Radius: Poetry from the Center to the Edge, Pretty Owl Poetry, White Stag Journal, The Pickled Body, The Good Men Project, Dark Matter Journal, Canary Literary Magazine, Bewildering Stories and numerous other publications.