JUST ANOTHER DAY AT SCHOOL

by Peter Witt

At least four people were killed and multiple people injured after a shooting Wednesday at a Barrow County high school, near Atlanta, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced, adding that a suspect was in custody. Photo: Women embrace following the shooting. (Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)—The Washington Post, September 4, 2024

A fourteen year old killed two innocent children Wednesday,
along with two teachers, somebody's sons or daughters,
partners or parents, people who will be saddened,
no devasted, as the police call asking
a relative to come to the morgue, the death house,
to identify the body of a child or an adult who rose this morning,
dressed, said goodbye to their loved ones, forever,
and headed out the door to school, where they waited 
for a 14 year old with access to a gun to shoot them, 
dead, dead, dead. dead.

And the best we'll be able to do is thoughts and prayers,
as the gun lobby mounts another round of efforts
to suppress any reasonable action, as talking heads
are paraded across the TV screen with the same tired
rhetoric, while anti-reform legislators collect 1000s
of dollars to stand pat, do nothing 
again, and again, and again, and again.

Soon there will be funerals, with tearful parents,
loved ones, a community of people holding candles,
perhaps a politician speaking truth about killing machines 
in the hands of children, young people hugging each other, 
while hallways and classrooms are cleaned,
students and community members are offered counseling, 
so in a short period of time school can resume,
funds can be raised for a permanent memorial,
and the issue can disappear from the news
until the next young person gains access to a gun,
access to a school and puts out the light
again and again and again and again
in another group of young people
and dedicated teachers’ eyes.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet who is repulsed by the argument that people kill people not guns...it's obviously both...he has published his poetry in a wide-variety of outlets.  When he's not writing he's out birding and reinforcing his understanding of the human connection to the natural world. He and his wife also travel extensively, having just returned from Iceland/Greenland, where the witnessed first hand the impacts of climate change.

THE SAME RULES APPLY

by Sam Barbee





Ruddy scar protracts the kept
thatch. Rusty shovels propped
as the backhoe heaves beside
the Common Grave: so many
paupers, so many people.

Pine box as caress, no time
for a tight-lipped benediction.
Spray of silt for mantles of boroughs,
and heights and neighborhoods.
No time for individual petitions.

No last kiss, or cross. Veterans
without flags or rifles on this
drab afternoon of a drab dawn.
Trees along the river, quiet field
where pigeons do not bother.

Death’s centrifugal angst plotted
within the City’s adaptable aura.
Time to seal today’s thawing dead.
The diesel throttles up. PPE-clad
laborers, leather palms tight.

Topsoil chokes off creeds, and
rings and rosaries, worry beads.
Distant tugboats sail the Hudson.
Gulls spiral behind their churning
murk, below pinwheels of gray clouds.

Sam Barbee’s poems have appeared Poetry South, The NC Literary Review, Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology VII: North Carolina.  His second poetry collection That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53) was a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016.

FORGOTTEN

by Tricia Knoll

I forget the name of the first boy who kissed me,
which books I read by Jane Austen during that summer
the l7-year locusts made their outbreak, the names
of most of the horses I’ve ridden except for Daisy—
the bay mare who galloped me to a win in a quarter-mile
race against a field of adolescents on dude ranch mounts.
I remember ear infections as a child with no medicines
because my parents believed in faith healing.
I remember my first polio shot at the age of 18, more
than a decade after everyone I knew had theirs.

Forgotten? The word, sir, blasphemes the dead
and those denied funerals and family mourning.
Those struggling to recover and keep family safe.
The worn out first responders and medical teams.
I fear for a grandson born in this year, a wee boy
for whom immunity is uncertain. I have staged
my will where my family can find it. I have
family who sit home from their jobs. We know
those risks for people of color from old,
old inequities, wonder why those who jobs
are critical to our survival as a people
work for minimum wage, without masks.

You may forget. At your peril and ours.
Are you counting your investments
in the medicine you hawk? Open
will not mean the way the world was.
Open will mean masks, tests, shots,
sanitizers, worry, strategies, research,
and consequences. New normal
will not forget what we have endured
and what we learn about the way
the world’s fate is tied up as one.
We have seen our Enemy.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet hunkered in the deep woods. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.

PASSING BY A CEMETERY TODAY

by George Salamon

"'No chance to see their loved ones again': Funerals in Italy have been banned, and many are being buried alone" —CBS News, March 27, 2020


I pass by an old cemetery on
My way to buy gasoline.
Who lives here? I ask
As I hear singing and watch
A squirrel jump down to the grass.
Who's in charge here? I ask.
The stones stand and listen,
They don't tell me who drops
The shadows from the trees,
Or what is swishing through
The grass. Then I look, and
I see the silence.


George Salamon is washing his hands and not touching his face in St. Louis, MO.

CARRYING FORWARD

by Tricia Knoll 

I have too many funerals to plan.
That’s what the rabbi said when asked

how he handles the mourning
and mornings that come after

the worst has happened. I need a break
the physician begs, no more stinking news.

I have to practice healing all over again.
The poet chews up the words she knows

for hate and they rub raw like hand-me-down
rags, unbought, stamped like prison garb.

The child asks after the star. What night
holds the star on that building?

The parents try to say all nights, all stars,
we are all one under all of them.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet who grew up in a community similar to Squirrel Hill. She regularly attends a church in a denomination whose buildings have come under violent attack for its religious liberalism and strong social justice stands.