MASS SHOOTING #6

14201 2nd Ave, Gabrielle Apartments & Townhomes, Highland Park, MI, Sep 28 2025

by Ron Riekki

“the war speaks at night

with its lips of shredded children,”

—Tyehimba Jess,

“Mercy”

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I ask where he’s working.  He says, “Illegally.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

He says he can’t move his hand, he’s doing poorly.

Says, “We need more jobs.”  Leaves, says I’m too “cop-vibe”-y.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

Inside a car, a man crying.  Not quite payday.

Says it’s been a long day, his face all teary.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

2 adults, 2 teens shot on this property

2 days ago—foot, foot, shoulder, chest injury.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

I ask if he’s OK.  He says, “yeah,” politely.

He says the problem’s “gun stores.”  They’re making money.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

White community’s answer is to “pray.”

I worry I can only think binary.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.

I GREW UP IN HIGHLAND PARK

by Tricia Knoll

Highland Park IL Fourth of July parade, circa 1965.

Twenty-nine spaces in the US carry this name.

When the news broke, I wondered if it was my home town.

It was. The place I lived for the first twenty years of my life. 

My home town as much as any other. Where I was born

 

more than seventy years ago. I hadn’t wondered how much

or what had changed. Videos brought it home. The store

that was once Chandlers where every year I went 

with my mother to get new pencils, pens, and notebooks

 to go back to school. The shoe store with the Xray

machine. The laundry owned by Chinese Americans 

where the windows always dripped with water. 

Mr. Leeds' jewelry store. Across the street

I bought my prom dress to dance with my first love. 

My first bank account on the corner of Central. 

Learning to drive in town across the railroad tracks.

Our library. Smelling the alewives on Ravinia Beach 

where I learned to swim and loved a sun tan.  

Hearing Louis Armstrong sing "Hello Dolly" 

at the festival. My father’s service

on the school board. The flooded

field where I learned to ice skate. The miles

of roads where I careened around on a bike. 

The day a migrating whooping crane stopped

in our flooded back yard. Long ago. Green

skies over oaks before tornados. 

 

My feet once knew every inch of that parade route.

You never really leave those old home towns. 

The red flags didn’t wave true here. The young man

got his assault rifle in a state and town known

for its tougher-than-most gun laws.

I supposed I wouldn’t know anyone who was there

after all these decades. That wasn’t true.

I knew two people who fled the explosions, one

a man I went to school with who fled with his

grandchildren and one a woman who lived next door

to me as a child. Everyone says it can happen

anywhere. I know that now. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet. When media people describe Highland Park's 30,000 residents as a small town, she's aware that in Vermont Highland Park would be Vermont's second largest city. She worried about possible violence in June for friends in Portland, Oregon going to the Pride Parade. Her next collection of poetry One Bent Twig is coming out from Future Cycle Press in early 2023—poems reflecting her love and concern for trees facing climate change. She has written about the red oaks of Highland Park.

REWIND

by Laura Rodley

If I write this poem

will you breathe again?

Will the bullet

eject itself from your heart,

close the hole where

the blood pumps out

over the ground,

will the blood surge

through the stunned portions

of your heart, your legs,

let them walk again?

If I write this poem

will it rewind time, stop the sale

of the automatic rifle

to a twenty-two year-old—

his whole life ahead of him—

who fired into

the 4th of July parade in Highland Park,

killing seven, no life ahead of them now.

If I write this poem

will the parade stop on 4th street

so where he stood on the roof

is too far away for his bullets

to reach, the slew of revelers

rerouted, over the river, safe.

If I write this poem

will this sky pour down its angels

to dismantle the armories,

dismantle the gun cabinets,

dismantle the twenty-two-year old’s gun,

dismantle the anger, despair, whatever

feeds this frenzy, though, yes, I know

angels can only surge their light,

flicker on the intention, even they cannot

lift the rifle, pull it out of his hands,

—given free choice,

the shooter must do it for himself,

should have chosen otherwise;

the next shooter must decide

for himself: put the weapon down.

Is it because of a lack of a way

to be a hero that they take up arms

and destroy? Rewind, give

the people back their lives. Do it now.

Laura Rodley, Pushcart Prize winner, is a quintuple Pushcart Prize nominee and quintuple Best of Net nominee. Latest books: Turn Left at Normal by Big Table Publishing, Counter Point by Prolific Press, and As You Write It Lucky Lucky 7, a collection of 11 writers' work.

A PERILOUS YEAR

by Tom Bauer

What fireworks are good enough on any
nation’s holiday? What illumination
is light enough? The light of sweet relief
is the light most creatures seem to love the best.
Where do we find it? Shooting in the streets
and yelling for our rights? Can we ever,
can anyone find peace in war and hate?
How can we feel our best? Ignore the worst?
Paint flowers in the mind? Sell hopes and smiles?
Bring on delightful lies and praise our kind?
It happens, and we never even knew
a flash of light could take it all away.
The long night’s fireworks scream at us all.
We cannot do this anymore. No more.


Tom Bauer's an old coot who lives in Montreal and plays a lot of board games.

7.4.22

by Don Brunnquell

Terrified paradegoers fled the Highland Park, Ill., Fourth of July event after shots were fired Monday. At least six people were dead, more than 40 people were hospitalized and a gunman was at large Monday afternoon after shooting Fourth of July paradegoers from a roof in this Chicago suburb, authorities said. (Photo: Lynn Sweet/AP via The Washington Post, July 4, 2022)

            In the dark times

            Will there be singing?

            Yes, there will be singing.

            About the dark times.

—Bertolt Brecht, “Motto”

 

Oh, say can you see, on this day

we celebrate what we used to call

one nation, with liberty and justice

for all, from every mountainside

let us sing all the songs our country

has earned, not only O beautiful

for spacious skies, but the mourning

dirge for today’s dead in Chicago parading

beside us with the children of Uvalde

and the spirit of George Floyd, not only

“Columbia the Gem of the Ocean”

but Woody’s “I Ain’t  Got No Home,”

and with fitting irony This land is your

land, this land is my land, recalling

whose land this really was, every verse

written on the mounds of the old bones.

Perhaps sing “You’re a Grand Old Flag”

not for the flag worship of the title,

but the lines, forever in peace

may you wave, and never a boast

or brag, sing “We Shall Overcome,”

but also the source of its tune,

“No More Auction Block For Me.”

All the songs need to be sung,

then return to “America the Beautiful,”

the closing lines of the second verse,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law. 

Don Brunnquell is a poet working in Saint Paul, MN after careers in pediatric psychology and bioethics.  He is one of the coordinators of the Midstream Poetry Series in the Twin Cities.