PERFECT PORTRAIT

by David Radavich

Sometimes metaphors are

too perfect for words:

 

Police in riot gear

standing in a school hallway

in Uvalde, Texas

                

doing nothing

 

for 77 minutes,

strolling, phoning,

reaching for hand sanitizer

 

while inside the classroom

the crazed gunman

mows down

 

one child after another

two teachers

 

air burning

with smoke and blood

 

and screams

only ending

 

when death explodes

or oozes out.

 

This is America in 2022:

Immobilized.  Imprisoned

in a trap of power.

Lost in the hallways

of moral evasion.

 

We can’t address

racial justice

or climate change,

enforced poverty

or violent inhumanity.

 

We are the cops

standing around

checking our phones

 

doing nothing

 

to save our children

to guarantee our future.

 

Look in this frame

and see 

 

what we’ve become.

Among David Radavich's poetry collections are two epics, America Bound and America Abroad, as well as Middle-East Mezze and The Countries We Live In.  His latest book is Unter der Sonne / Under the Sun: German and English Poems from Deutscher Lyrik Verlag.

OUTLIER

by Bonnie Proudfoot

Cartoon by Clay Jones

Outside, the chirping of birds is erased

by sirens and the latest newsfeed delivers

the latest news, the camera goes back

to school for this one, what a bitch,

some shy 15-year-old, his heart tethered

to his gun, uses lead for his brand of graffiti,

he wants to be a daredevil, a showstopper,

a level up in the (anti-) social strata

Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland,

new codes for manhood. Maybe

he was always an outlier,

maybe instead of a pet ocelot,

his dad bought him a Black Friday pistol,

he posts his picture on Facebook the next day

some ephemeral way to prove that

someone loves him.

 

In the hallway, the slaughter.

Bullets crisscross the walls,

Bodies left to bleed out on the floor,

outside a classroom door,

a voice calls, It’s ok, bro,

it’s the police you can come out now,

But the other students

have too much skin in the game,

stagger out the back window, shake. We

see the flowers, a few more crosses

on the roadway, messages of what’s

at stake. Meanwhile in America,

Kyle Rittenhouse walks free,

Parkland students protested,

but some in the US Congress denied

that shooting even happened. We

will see gun sales spike before Christmas,

Today, it’s hunting season in Ohio,

shots ring out in the woods,

the birds become silent. Sometimes I

can’t tell where the shots are coming from,

where they are headed.

Bonnie Proudfoot is a recipient of a Fellowship for the Arts in Creative Writing from the West Virginia department of Culture and History, and has had fiction and poetry published in The Gettysburg Review, Kestrel, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and other journals. Her first novel, Goshen Road, was published by Swallow Press in January of 2020, and was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for one of its Great Group Reads for 2020.  The novel was also long-listed for the 2021 PEN/ Hemingway award for debut fiction.