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The men are large, clad all-black,
balaclavad like ninja costumes
four year-olds wore last week.
Stiff flinty edges vest their chests.
They wield the only guns.
Two-on-one they seize the teacher,
batter-ram the door with her head.
Toddlers stare, she screams, parents
shake. The sun barely up for the day,
care kidnapped, spirited away.
Michelle DeRose wants to return to writing poems about her recently departed cat and the spot on her dog's back. Too many images from her original home town, Chicago, block that these days.
On 9/11/2001 guns were turned
on us as aeroplanes Noam Chomsky
explained before a crowd
at the University of Madras.
Now, twenty-four years later
guns are again pointing at us,
dropping down from
the Blackhawk hanging in the sky
over a building full of citizens
and migrants, brown-skinned,
shivering in the night air, ziptied,
naked, in bedclothes, stolen from
sleep and asked to produce birth
certificates, passports, doors
to their apartments bashed in
by three hundred masked
and camouflaged men showing
no search warrant, wearing
Infrared shades, an operation
to neutralize a migrant, deliverer
of food, driver, store clerk,
runner for the exchange of milk
and eggs, not the gang member
the Department of War Propaganda
deems reasonable cause for
the night raid on the South Side
against bona fide Americans
in these United States.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. His publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.
So a lost brother has taken a bullet.
We grasp after a coherent motive.
Another of the terminally online?
Noticing the victim did nothing to help
protect others from this kind of death.
Said a few deaths are worth his “freedom.”
Would he have considered his own death
by the gun worth it? Are we allowed to ask
whether this is irony or karma?
The mind unmoored from spirit, scrambled
by strange signals, tears loose from the real.
Can we be honest about our part in this?
Life is change, but fear turns change to death,
fear rooted in hatred, self-hatred
of the changing different one within.
I mourn his first death, the earlier one
when he turned away from decency and kindness
to join the church of the desecrated heart.
“A woman giving birth to a child has pain
because her time has come;
but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish
because of her joy that a child is born into the world”
—John 16:21
“until they have no meaning anymore and then slowly she says
‘Pain’…………………….”
i
For three days in a row—
August 30, 31, and September 1—
there were mass shootings
every day
in Chicago.
Four mass shootings
in three days
all in Chicago.
No other mass shootings anywhere in the U.S.
for those three days.
Only in Chicago
three days
straight.
Not much about it on the news. If at all.
But news on “Southern California battling heat and dangerous rip currents”
and “Powerball Jackpot soaring to $1.1 billion”
and “new safety standard to prevent flying beach umbrellas.”
In those same three days,
there were 33 individual shootings altogether
with 8 people killed
and 50 people with gunshot wounds.
58 people shot in 3 days
in Chicago.
Holiday weekend.
Holiday.
Holy
day.
. . .
And some of the ages
from the Gun Violence Archive
and police reports:
25-year-old female, “left temple, while riding in car”
18-year-old shot “in the leg.”
21-year-old male shot in the “hip.”
& “grandson was shot on the front porch.”
17-year-old female shot in the “arm.”
17-year-old male shot by “rifle.”
15-year-old male shot in the “head.”
22-year-old male shot in the “buttocks.”
And the repetition of the words “pronounced dead.”
I think of the pronunciation of the word ‘dead.’
I think of the aphasia that comes with extreme trauma.
I think of the grief of grief.
I think how the NRA has won: they have created Hell.
It is what they wanted.
It is what they want.
It’s what they have.
And “Age-restricted adult content”
where the history of violence is inaccessible,
because history is pornographic
with its violence
and “The content might not be appropriate for people under 18 years old”
and it discusses the killing of someone under 18 years old.
Irony.
And a gun owner says to me,
“We need guns to protect us from the guns.”
The cycle.
Psycho.
Cycle.
The loop.
In Chicago, I go to The Loop.
Noose.
The news
full of stories
yet absent of stories,
so many of the stories
absent
due to the repetition
where we ignore the repetition og
killed by AR-15.
Killed by assault weapons.
Killed at parties.
By assault weapons.
At parties.
Labor
Day
weekend.
ii
August 16, there was a mass shooting in Chicago
and a mass shooting in Detroit.
Later, I went to both.
They echoed.
They echo.
In Chicago.
. . .
I worry about the I.
Should I exist in this poem?
The ‘privilege’ of covering mass shootings.
My ignoring the warning of “be careful”
when where I am going is where no one can ‘be careful.’
I arrive.
I try to take myself out of the poem.
I fail.
I go to Chicago first.
. . .
Later, I see two Chicago police.
Turns out they’re not Chicago police.
They’re security.
They look like police,
act like police.
They’re not police.
“Louie Louie” plays on a box that booms.
We’re where it seems all of the lines in Chicago meet.
One of the security’s marked with K-9 Unit on his vest.
I ask if I can talk to him.
He prefers if I don’t.
Says I can talk to ‘him.’
‘Him’ is another security.
I talk to him.
I ask why there was so little police presence back in the day,
twenty or so years ago,
when I lived in Chicago.
He says, “Got more dangerous.”
He says, “They’d be hangin’ out on the train”
“doing robberies”
“assaults”
so they “took on security”
and here they are,
police presence,
except not police.
He says it “lessened assaults,”
their presence,
but it’s “not stopping them.”
I ask about all the mass shootings in Chicago.
At this, he walks away.
At the words “mass shootings,” he walks away;
the conversation is over.
He walks away, but says,
“I don’t know why people do what they do”
and then he’s gone.
. . .
Later,
they stop the train.
A worry there might be a bomb
or something
on it,
a bag that’s unattended
that was reported
and so police start boarding,
actual police,
many police,
and they point to the bag
where no one sits
and a woman apologizes,
says it’s hers.
She sits on the other side of the train,
far away from the bag,
on her phone,
lost in conversation.
They give her her bag.
The train starts up again.
. . .
Where the mass shooting happened,
it’s busy.
It’s daylight.
Another cop tells me not to go there at night.
I don’t go at night.
It’s day.
There’s a bus stop nearby.
An empty field too.
Overgrown grass.
A fence that looks haunted.
Fence that looks like it survived a fist fight.
Leaning tower of fence.
Ineffective fence.
And a haunted-looking house across the street
with its bottom part painted all black
and the fence
also black
with speckles of spray painted white
and Chicago is loud:
brakes, sirens, horns, speeding cars, endlessly loud.
Someone walks by with a Bulls shirt.
The cars are busy.
The people are busy.
Jessica, age 32, talks to me.
She looks much younger than 32.
I ask if she knows about the mass shooting
that happened just days ago
where we’re standing.
She doesn’t.
But she lives nearby,
in the Ukrainian Village.
She’s black.
She talks about someone “killed for his chain”
And how he assumed “they wouldn’t do it to” him.
Do what?
Rob him.
Kill him.
For his chain.
Jessica tells me she’s “pro Second Amendment,”
says she “could have a gun” on her
now.
I ask if she does.
She says she’s “legally able” to.
I ask if that means she’s carrying a gun on her.
She avoids the question.
She talks about how she’s “educated,”
that she’s studying through University of Phoenix online,
and interested in “home ownership.”
She says there is “advantage” to “white men.”
She says she’s “perceived” as a “white woman” when she talks on the phone
so she is “treated differently”
on the phone.
She says people can tell she’s not from Chicago.
I ask how to stop mass shootings.
She says one word: “resources.”
She says that shootings happen because
“respect is something that people trust as more important than money,
more valuable than their own lives.”
She says that “gun culture” is seen as
“cool.”
She says, “the problem is the system.”
She talks about renting
and how you end up owning nothing.
She talks with me a long time.
I don’t realize it’s because she’s waiting for the bus.
The bus comes.
And the conversation is over instantly
with the bus.
There’s a chicken shack across the street.
It’s busy.
Every mass shooting,
it seems like it’s near a place of business
that’s busy,
making money.
$.
I stand there.
It’s loud.
iii
I go to Saginaw.
300 miles away.
I get there.
It feels the same in a lot of ways.
I’ve been to three sites of Michigan mass shootings in the last three months.
They’re all in urban areas—Saginaw and Detroit—
but feels incredibly rural.
Incredibly isolated,
even in the middle of major city.
And all of the mass shootings,
they have this combination
of a field,
a field
overgrown
empty
abandoned
but nearby
a liquor store—
with beer signs all over it
and large lettering of
BEER * WINE * LIQUOR
LOTTO * GROCERY * EBT
The stores busy.
The customers, all black.
Inside, a worker behind what appears to be long bulletproof glass
and he looks Middle Eastern,
wearing a thick chain
and I ask if he’ll talk about the mass shooting
and he says, “No.”
“No.”
Again, he says, “No.”
He points outside.
I go outside.
I ask a customer if he’ll talk about the mass shooting.
He stands there, staring at me, sizing me up.
I tell him I don’t want names.
I just want to know how we stop violence in black communities.
4 men and 1 woman were shot here.
When I first drove up, instantly, all I saw, coming out of the store:
five children.
Popsicles.
Or empty handed.
Kids.
The customer tells me, “We’ve got something going on here”;
he gets into a car with two others
and leaves.
I walk up to another car—two women in their 60s.
I ask them if it would be OK to talk about how we lessen violence in black communities.
“In communities,” one of the women says,
“Not black communities. In all communities.”
She gets out, goes inside. That is all she’ll ever say to me.
The other woman says, “We need them to patrol all day.”
I ask if she wants more police presence.
“Yes.”
She asks me if I’ve seen any police here.
I haven’t.
In Chicago, it felt police were everywhere.
It felt like police were in vehicles
walking patrols
on bikes.
In Chicago, it felt like police were in the grocery stores
and on the train
and in the mirrors
and on your skull.
In Chicago, it felt like Chicago was owned by the constant sound of sirens.
That Chicago is, at its heart, a siren.
Here, Saginaw, I didn’t see any police
from the moment I drove in
to the moment I left,
driving by an elementary school
that wasn’t far from the mass shooting.
I ask her if there’s anything else other than more patrols.
She points to the field nearby,
how overgrown it is.
She’s upset with this,
feels the City doesn’t care about the city.
“Unkempt” is the word she uses.
She talks of beautification.
I tell her the news is reporting that witnesses aren’t collaborating.
She frowns at this,
says she won’t speak to that.
She goes inside the store.
I walk across the street.
A community center.
Empty.
An abandoned building next to it.
Empty.
A chain hangs in front of it,
the weakest attempt at fence imaginable.
It looks like you can just walk in through the abandoned windows.
The word ‘haunted’ keeps coming to me.
Haunted
haunted
haunted haunted.
Telephone lines.
Telephone wires.
A haunted FOR SALE sign.
The haunted sounds of haunted traffic.
Hip-hop in the far distance, with the slow delivery of the MC.
I drive away, craning to look at the elementary school.
The last signs I see:
WARNING SECURITY CAMERAS IN USE
and
WE NEED YOU BUCKLE UP
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
