JULY NIGHT AFTER THE SHOT AT TRUMP

by Tricia Knoll

I open a fortune cookie with my take-out 
egg fu young from Men at Wok. No fortune. 
 
Fewer fireflies than last week light up
this humid July night.
 
The grass needs mowing. Jewel weed
takes over the woods.
 
The first bitternut hickory falls from
the trees looming over my skylights. 
 
My shy dog flinches like the nut
is a bullet aimed at her easy life. 
 
I read a list of assassinations.
Kids learned about Lincoln.
 
I remember Kennedys, King,
and Milk. One King, a Mayor,
 
of Mt Pleasant, Iowa shot
when a citizen’s sewage backed up. 
 
Of course, the gun was an AR 15, 
what the  NRA calls America’s gun.
 
A long night unrolls with drips
of information. The names of the dead
 
withheld. Lamentations in the fairground
field. Endless replays of a bloody ear. 
 
I swat at the mosquito buzzing in mine. 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet old enough to vividly remember the shooting of President Kennedy announced to her high school over a public address system while she took a French test. Her most recent chapbook The Unknown Daughter contains persona poems linked to reactions in a community that houses the Tomb of the Unknown Daughter.

ALLEN GINSBERG'S "AMERICA" (AND OURS)

by Robert Knox

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” 

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, 1956

 

I am frankly envious of the poet who, on Jan. 17, 1956,

wrote, in a poem entitled “America,”

“America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.”

 

Tennessee, I invite, in the same spirit of candor,

go shoot yourself with your absolutely unqualified no-foolin’, stand-your-ground

irredeemably nut-case gun rights laws,

per events on the ground taking place March 28, 2023.

I could simply echo every sentiment in that mid-century poet’s inspired piece

     of unbridled spontaneity

composed on the theme of his America, in which he that mid-century poet vowed,

amid other proclamations,

“I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind”…

but I do not expect to be in my right mind

so long as the YMCA in which I seek to run away from my fury and despair

offers news channels on its TV service available to rats like me

who run on treadmills of anger and despair

 

Networks, that is, on which the munitions-injury expert

is asked to describe the effect of AR ammunition on the bodies of children,

and what I increasingly wish somebody (even crazier than me) would do

to the persons of the elected Tennessee officials

who valiantly protected their freedom-loving constituents from any limitation,

however slight and publicly supported by official law enforcement,

on their natural right to destroy the bodies of children

with whatever armaments the Good Lord, acting through the protected mediation

    of the National Rats Association,

entitles them to possess

 

“America,” Ginsberg demanded in his disarming and eternally youthful way:

“when will you take your clothes off?”

“America” – how’s this for pre-visioning the paramilitary far right?—

“why are your libraries full of tears?”

 

America, we ask in our hair-tearing, torn-clothing way,

Why are your courthouses, state houses, ballot boxes and school boards

full of self-made demagogues who failed to read the books

in their now besieged schoolhouses when they had the chance?

who think that libraries are merely back alleyways for the gang fights

     of the culture wars?

America, we ask, why do the voters of Tennessee develop amnesia of the ballot box?

When will it end, America, your war on humanity?

When will you be worthy of your blues singers, jazzmen, street corner poets,

         dancers on the page as well as on the stage?

When will you invite Stephen Colbert to be the speaker at the next inauguration?

America, the cherry trees are blossoming

and I feel sentimental about the days of wine and roses and that legendary decade ban

     on assault rifles…

and even when the party of Richard Nixon was, by comparison, a beacon of moderation

Americans, we are obsessed by media, by the Chinese timebomb that goes TikTok, TikTok

 

America, the best minds of my generation are already underground

America, there is nobody left to vote for

America, our ancestors saved the world from fascism

But all the fascists have to do today is show their pure-white fannies on TV

and the writing on the wall goes tic-toc-clock, as the timebomb of private self-interest

     melts the glaciers

and brings the ocean to your living room

just before the signoff of the foxed and phony nooz

 

America, you are teaching all the world how to kill people,

     best result for the buck

Because that is all you remember how to do

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the recently published collection of linked short stories, titled House Stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site.

THIRTEEN DAYS ON “THE NRA CIVIL RIGHTS CALENDAR”

by Gilbert Allen

Blood On Their Hands _ Anti-NRA T-Shirt by Sarana Mehra

January 1

If the world seems cold

to you, perhaps

you’ve already fired.

January 6

Stop

the Magnetometers!

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Guns don’t make the world

go round. Guns make

the rounds worthwhile.

Ash Wednesday

Praise the One before whom

thou needest no silencer.

April 1

We inherit our relatives, but

we can choose

our AR-15s.

Good Friday

It is more blessed to grieve

than to reprieve.

Memorial Day

Talk not of wasted

ammunition. Talk instead of those

you’ve wasted

July 4

Believe the worst

about everybody. That way

you don’t have to aim.

Labor Day

My bullets are Teflon.

My burden is light.

Halloween

Every boy

needs a blackbird

to shoot at.

Thanksgiving

Guns don’t kill turkeys.

Turkeys kill turkeys.

December 24

I am the ghost

of Kevlar passed.

New Year’s Eve

Some of us are like cannons: we don’t

like to be pushed, and we’re only happy

when loaded.

Gilbert Allen lives and writes in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. His most recent collection of poems is Believing in Two Bodies.

FINGERPRINTS

by Peter Witt

A mother in Black Creek, GA

drops her child off at school,

heads to the AR-15 assembly line

at Daniel Defense, where guns

coming off the assembly line

are packed by a father of three,

two in college, one still in high school.

A young woman, barely out

of high school processes online

orders for the killing machines

from gun stores across the U.S.,

trying not to think about if one

will end up in the hands of an 18

year old with murderous intent.

The owner of a Uvalde gun store

remembers legally selling the semi-

automatic weapon of mass destruction

to a young man who'd just turned 18,

then heading home for a birthday party

for his elementary school-aged niece.

A host of people, some with children,

have their fingerprints on the bullets

that made their way into the hands

of the Uvalde shooter, never realizing

they'd touched the bullets

that would shatter bones, blur faces

in a one-hour classroom rampage.

Somewhere in a peaceful office

a NRA publicist cranks out scripts

that pols and apologists can use

when the inevitable questions

about gun safety and control emerge,

he's yet to marry, have children,

doesn't think that children killed

in the sure to be future mass murders

could someday be his offspring.

In a conference room in Black Creek, GA,

the owner of the killing machine company

authorizes another 50K donation to the NRA,

a necessary cost of doing business,

profits from his company putting

his children through college.

Airforce One ferries the president and his wife

to yet another memorial gathering

where he will console parents whose

children never came home from school,

having only recently returned from

a similarly gathering of families

recovering from the hatred of a racist

who shot up a supermarket in their town.

At dinner tables around the country

families gather over traditional

Memorial Day hot dogs and hamburgers,

some with thoughts and prayers,

others to have discussions

about the need to own a gun,

protect their families, stave off

the murderous intent of someone

who purchased a gun made, shipped,

sold by fellow citizens, many with school

aged children—who firmly believe

the 2nd amendment is God's will

and plan to protect their children

from mayhem...

while somewhere in a bedroom

a young man, not yet 18, dreams of the day

he too can go the local gun store, purchase

an assault weapon made, shipped,

and sold by people with children,

so that he too can join the ranks

of the dead who've created

mayhem in a supposedly safe

classroom somewhere in the U.S.A.

Peter Witt lives in Texas, only a few hours away from Uvalde.  His work has appeared in The New Verse News, other online publications, and several print volumes.

PERFORMANCE BONUS

by Imogen Arate

Four of the Republican senators bankrolled by the NRA. From left to right Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Richard Burr, and Roy Blunt. —Newsweek has the “Full List of Republican Senators Who Receive Funding From the NRA.”

Every time a bullet screams a child's name

Congress rings in a payday

Every time gold-strung puppets mimic "thoughts and prayers"

NRA makes it rain

The more they pile up

the cheaper they come

The higher the body count

the bigger the ROI.

The stock market may be free-reeling

NFTs may be worthless

but LaPierre makes good on his promises

though he trades in rubles 

We've arrived at the age 

of lead-pegged currency

We've come to celebrate each day

as gun-violence survival day

drunk the mercurial mead 

of gilded hearts playing 

a mental-health sleight of hand

while we thirsted for salves

that vanished as another gunman

turned the page onto another tragedy

danced our last to the whizzing rhythm

of gun-powdered blues

as we grew confused over 

which loved ones got shot when

or which crisis actors got paid

while feigning condolences 

Imogen Arate is an award-winning Asian-American poet and writer and the Executive Producer and Host of Poets and Muses, a weekly poetry podcast that won second place at National Federation of Press Women's 2020 Communications Contest, where she has served as a national-level poetry judge in 2021 and 2022.  Her poetry has appeared in 18 publications on four continents.  You can find her @PoetsandMuses and @ImogenArate on Twitter and Instagram.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE U S OF A

by deb y felio

The former guy "is scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association's Annual Leadership Forum on Friday. But audience members at the group's annual meeting, being held this year in Houston, won't be able to carry guns during his address. The conference is going ahead in the shadow of Tuesday's mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed at least 21 people—including 19 students." —NPR, May 25, 2022

Let us now raise our voices

for the freedom we have to make our choices

of who lives who dies 

and not on the battlefields where all are armed

but at schools and churches newly charmed

with flowers and toys, memorialized.

Let us now send out our thoughts and prayers

and pay no notice to the real players

who love to make a stand

not against the gun lobbyists

or restrictions for purchases

those real actions would be too grand.

So Texas before you can bury the children

the NRA you will be welcoming

and after all it isn’t guns that kill.

But if that eighteen year old had entered

that school today and stuck out his finger

would so many lives have been stilled?

deb y felio is a poet writing as witness to the mundane and miraculous and the under-represented sides of historic and current issues while working as a family and child therapist in Colorado. Published credits include anthologies Hay(na)ku 15; Gabriel’s Horn: Startled by Nature (2020); Refuse to Stay Silent (2020). Her cherita sequence was a finalist in MacQueens’s Quarterly March 2021 ekphrastic challenge.

TREE

by Katherine Smith

Kevin Siers, The Charlotte Observer, NC

The maples scatter their necklaces of seedpods

to the grass. My heart aches

for Texas where yesterday an eighteen-year-old

walked into a school and shot

 

eighteen children, more than one for each year of his life.

Anger spins inside me like wind-torn seeds.

All year long in the classroom I teach my students

to barricade the doors. The children are right

 

to ignore me. They go on chatting

while I point to tables and chairs.

My explanation will do no good

as the faces of congressmen and senators

 

at the NRA convention in Houston

do no good, pledging allegiance

chins up, wooden jaws squared as if relishing

yet another opportunity to stand rooted

 

like dead wood to their murderous cause.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

PUBLIX

by Ron Riekki

In a Royal Palm Beach, Florida Publix filled with lunchtime shoppers, a man Thursday walked into the produce section, fatally shot a woman and her young grandson, and then turned the gun on himself, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said. —Palm Beach Post, June 10, 2021 [Photo credit: GREG LOVETT/palmbeachpost.com]

Another shooting, this one at the grocery store where I go 

every week. Sixty separate shootings throughout the US 

today, and the day’s not done, except the day is done, a day 

shot, shit, really. Forty-five injured today. Forty-five. I hate 

that number. Jolts into my mind, cold, the radio announcing, 

TV announcing, ex-girlfriend announcing, Isn’t that the store 

you always go to? A grandmother dead, her grandson dead, 

a one-year-old boy, in “the produce section.” And what does 

America produce? Twenty-one killed today. So far. Suffer 

is what we do. Grandmother. One-year-old grandson. Blocks 

from me. I went there yesterday, bought bananas, bread, beer. 

My ex- says, you know, I’ve never read a poem where some- 

one wrote simply, ‘Fuck the NRA.’ You should do that. She’s 

Haitian, hates guns, has this way of saying curse words where 

you feel Shiva is in the room. My ex- before my ex- had 

a brother who committed suicide, how she died after that, 

disappeared in my hands, turned to ghost, still alive, but I 

felt her slip through my arms, gone, like morning. I drove 

by the store, the tape around it, sign saying Closed to Sunday, 

how empty inside, and not, how if felt filled with ghosts, so 

many of them that you couldn’t see anything but the dark 

of the dead pressed together in the heat of the day. How hot. 

My air conditioner in the car broken. How hot. Drowning 

in it. Forty-five. Twenty-one. Three. And one headline 

that sticks out from two days ago: “‘Our kids are becoming 

extinct’: Chicago children are being killed by guns at far 

faster rate than years past.” Far. I’m south Florida. So far. 

And the fear is that we’re numb, that we’re OK with numbers 

now, how we’ve gotten used to this. How hot. How hot.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

by Michael Calvert

“The NRA at FedEx.” Cartoon by Nick Anderson, April 20, 2021.

“Even as National Rifle Association leaders are called to testify in the second week of a bankruptcy trial, the gun rights organization is launching plans to lobby Congress against gun-control measures backed by President Biden and leading Democrats.” —The Washington Post, April 22, 2021

Our founders, in their wisdom, did decree

That, to protect their sacred liberty

And keep their wives and sweethearts from all harm,

All had the right to own a firearm.

 

To own a flintlock musket, that is, so

When called, those brave and stalwart men could go

To form up a militia, march off, and

Defend their precious homes and native land.

 

However, there's been one annoying glitch,

A technicality, and it's a bitch,

In the amount of time that they allowed

To load one shot, some nut can kill a crowd.

 

So now we bleed, and more die every day

To make our land safe for the NRA.

 

Michael Calvert has worked as a teacher, writer and editor in the corporate world. His poems have appeared in Light and Writer’s Digest.

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).

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.

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.

OLD SOLDIER NOT FADING AWAY

by George Salamon

1987 cartoon by Steve Artley

Oliver North, the disgraced Regan administration staffer turned right-wing commentator who was recently tapped to lead the NRA, is already off to a running start at his new gig—smearing anti-gun activists like the Parkland high school protesters as criminals. —Salon, May 10, 2018


Old soldier Ollie North,
Ronnie's  man for Iran-Contra,
Decorated warrior, but
Disgraced wheeler-dealer
For lying to Congress and
Shredding government docs,
Selling arms to Iran and oppressing
People's rebellion in Nicaragua,
Has risen from the golden ashes
Of television celebrity
To lead the fight for making
America stand, once again,
For guns, guts and glory.
Fi on you, Ollie, but
Hold the Semper.

George Salamon served in the Army's 4th Armored Division where he was initially a sniper in the armored infantry. He's been sniping only verbally since then.

THE STUDENTS WALK OUT ANYWAY

by Lois Rosen

Nate at Instagram

Although a Needville, Texas principal
threatens suspension,

though parents in Billings, Montana warn
they’ll ground their kids,

though the NRA tweets an AR15 photo
I’ll control my own guns, thank you,

though South Carolina Governor McMaster
calls the walkout left wing and shameful,

though the church shooter’s sister hisses
I hope it’s a trap and they all get shot,

students join hands, make speeches,
chant, read victim’s names,

hold signs sob, pray, stand silent
for six minutes. There are no words.

Lois Rosen won Willamette Writers’ 2016 Kay Snow Fiction Award. The Rainier Writing Workshop awarded her an MFA and a Debra Tall Memorial Scholarship. Her poetry books are Pigeons (Traprock Books, 2004) and Nice and Loud (Tebot Bach, 2015). Lois’s writing has appeared before in TheNewVerse.News. Her story “The Hollywood Life” was performed at the inaugural Liars’ League PDX.

FOR EMMA GONZALEZ

by Anna M. Evans





This girl looks like a younger Joan of Arc,
whose mission, burning in her, was the spark
that helped to light her nation in the dark.
This girl looks like a younger Joan of Arc.

Her mission, burning in her, is the spark
that kindles the crowd to chant, Never again!
The NRA can’t stop this hurricane.
Her mission, burning in her, is the spark.

The crowd is solid, chanting, Never again!
They’re marching with their families for our lives,
and for the dead, whose spirit still survives.
The crowd is solid, chanting, Never again!

We’re marching with our families for our lives,
led by this girl, a younger Joan of Arc,
showing us all the way to leave our mark:
by marching with our families for our lives.

This girl, though young, is like her: Joan of Arc.
Her mission, burning in her, is the spark
to light and lead our nation out the dark.
This girl’s a heroine, our Joan of Arc.

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.

I FLAUNT MY "F" GRADE

by Tricia Knoll






Fumed.
Fussed at folly.
Feeling firebrand-ish.
Flabbergasted and furious.
Formidable at finger-pointing.
Fixed, firm and fretted.
Fault-finder.
Fireproof and flinty.
Family-oriented.
Friendly to school kids.
Unflinching
Finally,
NRA: keep my F rating
in your book. I know it’s in
the big book at end of days,
the one that counts.
Finis.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon writer whose poetry book How I Learned to Be White (an investigation of how white privilege has impacted her life and how she has come to understand it) is now available from Antrim House. 

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.

THE ARMED TEACHER

by Anna M. Evans

I own an arsenal of ways to think,
and choose the weapon just as I see fit.
I’m packing color markers and red ink;
my Power Points are reinforced with wit.

I used a Glock once, at a rifle range,
but, even muffled, couldn’t stand the sound.
I wasn’t a bad shot, but it was strange,
the way the target swung with every round.

Sometimes I think, what if it happened here?
I’d lock the door, of course. I know the drill.
But every day we need to fight the fear,
and fear’s not something you can shoot to kill.

So, you can keep your bullets, guns and knives.
I’m armed with words, and working to save lives.

Anna M. Evans’ poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the Editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her new collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is out now from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press. 

COST

by Neil Creighton

Parkland students watch as Florida legislators vote down a resolution to discuss a ban on assault weapons.

So Sam rose early, saddled his donkey,
and took his children up the mountain.
And his children said
“Where is the offering, our father,
and who is this god we praise?”
“You are the offering, my children.”
Then hail of fire descended
and bright blood flowed until all were gone.
Sam sighed, thought he would pray,
wept a little as he descended the mountain.
A congregation waited below.
“It’s hard,” he said, “so hard.
But what can we do?
We don’t wish it but we must worship.”

And the great congregation shouted “Amen”.

Neil Creighton is an Australian poet whose work as a teacher of English and Drama brought him into close contact with thousands of young lives, most happy and triumphant but too many tragically filled with neglect. It also made him intensely aware of how opportunity is so unequally proportioned and his work reflects strong interest in social justice. Recent publications include Poetry Quarterly, Poeming Pigeon, Silver Birch Press, Rat's Ass Review, Praxis Mag Online, Ekphrastic Review, Social Justice Poetry, Peacock Journal, Poets Reading the News and Verse-Virtual.

A CHILDREN'S CRUSADE

by Ralph La Rosa

The evolution of revolution
is a student-led crusade,
its first and foremost resolution:
the NRA must be waylaid.


Ralph La Rosa’s work has been published online, including at TheNewVerse.News, and in the books Sonnet Stanzas and Ghost Trees.