ACHE

by Ron Riekki

Artist Frederic Remington painted “The opening of the fight at Wounded Knee” in 1891. The massacre took place on December 29, 1890.

"There have been more mass shootings than days this year: As of December 25, the 359th day of the year, there have been 406 mass shootings in the U.S., according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which tracks every mass shooting in the country. Twenty-nine of those shootings were mass murders." —Jason Silverstein, CBS News, December 25, 2019

“The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history took place in 1890, when representatives of the U.S. government executed as many as 300 Native men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for practicing Ghost Dancing, a spiritual tradition within our culture.” —Allen Salway, Teen Vogue, June 14, 2018

“Arise from their graves” —William Blake, “Ah! Sun-flower”

Ugh! Gun-powder!  weary of EMT
shifts, how it may look like an entrance
wound in front and an exit wound in back,

but it was really two bullets, fired behind
and in front, and bullets, now, with shitty
NRA-backed legislation are made to

ricochet around in the chest once they
enter, going from organ to organ, intro-
ducing themselves with a bloodbath,

destroying colons and lungs and spleens,
the way that colonizers smallpoxed
and large-poxed and sent poxes upon

thee—the Pawnee, the Cherokee, the
Kansa?  Have you never heard of the
Kansa?  Because extinction is erasing—

worse than erasing, de-racing, destroy-
ing the -ing of a people: their breathing,
talking, writing, hearts beating, cultures

living.  And over an Xmas dinner,
we get on guns, and I say that I wish
I could take all the gun-owners and

put them on an ambulance with me,
allow them to see what bullets do,
see bullets in merry-go-rounds and

bullets in dollhouses and bullets in
Etch A Sketches where you shake
the world and nothing changes.

Ron Riekki's most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press, 2019).

THE TRAIL OF FEARS

by Alejandro Escudé

Opening scene of The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin

As if the sun had turned into a great pyramid
as if the moon were the trophy wife of Ares
as if the sidewalks were now trapped in the 50’s,
just the sidewalks, as if the purr of the cat where
the same purr of the cat in Slovenia, in Krakow,
as if the professor were under arrest, handcuffed
to the rusty rail of a secret prison, as if the road
were now one long burning trail, a fiery border
on each side and just beyond a trio of Cherokee
staring across to a herd of dead, scattered buffalo,
as if the arrowhead had been taken to a Hooters
in downtown Denver, where it was left on a greasy
table along with leftover fries like the bodies
of Syrian children, as if all Americans were
exiled from America, a great migration across
an invisible land bridge, sidestepping mammoth
carcasses and landmines, sabertooth skulls,
to reach a country that no one ever promised.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.