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).

OCTOBER 17, SWEETEST DAY

by Ron Riekki

or, this year, Sweatiest Day, how hot 

 

the goddamn gowns and gloves are in- 

side the war of the COVID wards, how 

STUPID are the anti-maskers, the 27— 

at my current count—White Housers 

positive, and here I’m a pessimist, 

seeing the ramifications, seeing the 

ventilators, seeing the conventions, 

 

packed with people; or maybe it’s 

 

the SWATest Day, the ICEist day, 

these days of mass pollution/mass 

arrests for immigrants just trying 

to go to mass, or to work; or may- 

be it’s the Sleepiest Day, the mass 

hypnosis of this world, being told 

that this virus will just "go away," 

 

told by someone who, by the way, 

 

could get re-infected, someone who 

just had a runny nose, but now who’s 

running for President when he has 

never yet actually been President, 

or been presidential, just swinging 

pendulums in front of our eyes, 

telling us we’re feeling sleepy, so 

 

sleepy; or maybe it is, as I said, 

 

the Heat-est Day, the Hottest Day, 

the hottest October 17 that’s ever 

been recorded, because, sadly, 

that’s the theme of this year, how 

there haven’t really been any holi- 

days this year, just evil-days, sad- 

days, maydays, doomsdays, play- 

 

days where kids can’t touch, birth- 

 

days where we can’t hug, because 

we’re on an expressway to hell if 

we don’t stop the way we treat 

the world and the way we treat 

each other, if we fall for the tricks 

that led us to this collapse, the tricks 

of 2016 where the U.S. was covered 

 

in red.  Honestly, aren’t you, too, tired? 

Ron Riekki's latest books in 2020 are Niiji (Cyberwit, co-written with Sally Brunk), i have been warned not to write about this (Main Street Rag), and The Many Lives of It (McFarland).

C0LDER (S0NNET 0) AND C0LDER, BERKELEY

by Ron Riekki

“Arrests made as hundreds protest Ann Coulter speech” 

—Los Angeles Times, November 20, 2019

Walking to the grocery store, I turn a corner to see
dozens of cops in riot gear, them loading vans
with weapons, the militarization of the police
where I see more of them in this minute—as I walk
nervously through their bulletproof everything—
than I had seen in a decade of small-town life,
but this is the time of riots and gear, of fire and fear,
and I remember walking to the same store just after
the last riot where the ground held footprints in blood
where I could see the exact path where someone had run
for their life, and my neighbor told me, "I bet today
was the hottest day it’s ever been here,” and there’s
a streetlight gone, the post yanked out of the ground.


Ron Riekki’s most recent book is Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).