A PUBLIC CORPSE ROTS FASTER THAN A PRIVATE ONE

(After the July 2025 Midtown Manhattan Mass Shooting)

by Michael T. Young

When you read news about
a mass shooting, when you read 

the names of the dead, you don’t expect 
to know anyone. You don't expect 

to wither into a shock of knowing,
your words to wither into the heart-shaped 

emptiness of condolences. And you are
surprised by your anger at conspiracy theories

that feast on day-old death as it were bacteria
on a corpse, brown-rot on a piece of fruit—

the coverup, the motives. And where is there
to hide if your private connection becomes

a public debate, and questions pervert your
mourning, filling it with voices and doubt, until

your loss is corrupted into another story
that conceals what no one dares speak?

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Rattle, and Vox Populi.

MURDER AND MENTAL HEALTH

by W. Barrett Munn 

Jesus Christ

thought he was God; a governor
washed his hands;

A governor proclaims
murder a problem of mental health;
did another governor just wash his hands?

Uncle Bryson
spent his life in mental health confinement;
he didn't kill anyone, so
why was he there? Uncle Bryson 
never owned a rifle, never knew
a bullet from a bassoon, but a risk nonetheless,
mental health, it’s not a guess, it’s a problem—

we can be more than certain 
of crazies stalking the horizon, the mentally ill, 
ready to kill, spree shooters who will 
surely shoot lots of someones somewhere sometime soon. 

Shooters are, we can trust, only problems of mental health.
We better all go out and buy another gun.

W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children's Literature and studied with Larry Callen. His poetry has appeared in The New Verse News, The Awakenings Project, Kairos Literary Magazine, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Speckled Trout, and many others.

ST. FRANCIS IN TULSA

by Anne Harding Woodworth

Shot and killed on the campus of Saint Francis Health System in Tulsa on June 1 were (clockwise from top left) patient William Love, physician Preston Phillips, receptionist Amanda Glenn, physician Stephanie Husen. —KOAM, June 2, 2022.

Four makes it mass murder.

But 4 doesn’t compare to 10 or 21

or 26, except that it does.

Brother Sun, shine on them.

Four names in Tulsa

tragically forgotten as coffins

continue to be interred elsewhere.

Mother Earth, hold them all.

Four gunned down

by a brand-new semi-automatic,

all shiny and eager.

Brother wind, evaporate the tears.

Three were in the gunner’s way,

only the fourth was sought—

for revenge against a healer

of pain. Pain infiltrates.

Pain torments the mind

as it does the body.

Sister Moon, light the darkness.

The gun is always there.

It waits. In a drawer.

In a case. On a coffee table.

On a store shelf. Waits

to be bought by a child

until it waits no more,

rides to the hospital

and seeks to inflict pain

on the one who seeks to end it

and the ones who seek to live,

gunned down by a brand-new

semi-automatic, shiny and eager.

Sister Water, write the names.

 

Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of a seventh book of poetry, Trouble, which received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry. Her eighth book, Gender: Two Novellas in Verse, will appear in October.

PHIL OCHS IN SPRING 2021

by David Chorlton

Photo credit: Phoenix Rescue Mission: “Last summer, record-breaking heat took the lives of 494 men and women in Arizona. As a community, we need to step up and reach out to those who may not know how deadly our summer can be.”

Wake up; check for rain; the daily high’s

a body count and rubbing the eyes

won’t move the images away

of yesterday’s encampment

winding around two downtown blocks

in plain sight of the sky.

It’s so hot all

I can do is to pour

this bottle of water over

my legs, and then

another, and

then another. It isn’t even news today

 

with nine semi-automatic victims

in California and

a gunman’s high-capacity rage

recalled by his ex-wife:

I'm going to beat him up, I'm going

to kill the son-of-a-gun;

Sometimes people say

things like that

when they're mad. The bedding is makeshift

on Eleventh Avenue, the clothing

T-shirt bright,

and blankets soften

the pavement in varying shades

of poverty. Sometimes a face

floats out from among

the collage of nylon and humanity:

remember it. Remember just

this one on behalf of them all. Remember

the song: And there but for fortune,

may go you

or go  I

 

David Chorlton is a transplanted European, who has lived in Phoenix since 1978. His poems often reflect his affection for the natural world, as well as occasional bewilderment at aspects of human behavior. A new book, Unmapped Worlds, featuring older poems that had suffered neglect, is out from FutureCycle Press. He recently took up watercoloring again, after twenty dry years.

PAGE FROM A BOOK OF DAYS

by David Chorlton

Swallows at the windswept pond

this morning, quick as good fortune, make the light

sway back and forth above

the water while it keeps

its secrets dark.

                         It’s a quiet time;

Say’s Phoebes barely clear the grass before

returning to the fence from which they came,

and a Loggerhead Shrike moves down

from the desert

with a prayer in his beak.

                                         The Red-tailed Hawk

has made the streets his hunting ground

where the pigeon flock

scatters left, right and skyward

as his shadow scythes between them.

One more day;

                       another step toward

the unknown, with a moodswing peak

to peak along the mountain

as it leans back against the sky. A different

message blows

                         from each direction: another

ten killed in Colorado; the doves

returning early from the tropics; music

on the radio so old

it wouldn’t recognize the world today;

and the voice within, too long

in solitude to know

what its next word should be.

Throughout the pandemic David Chorlton has lived quietly and communicated with the local wildlife. His new book Unmapped Worlds from FutureCycle Press features poems that hid in his files for too many years and which now enjoy new exposure. 

NINE DEAD IN DAYTON

by Martin H. Levinson

Map of the 2,162 mass shootings since Sandy Hook. —Vox

twenty-two in El Paso, twenty-one
in San Ysidro, forty-nine in Orlando,
fourteen in San Bernardino,
fifty-eight by a Las Vegas casino,
a crowd of concertgoers,
bodies lying bleeding, a
nation that is reeling, the
core of who we are, posting
hate, loading up, firing fast
and down they go in Walmarts,
at festivals, inside of schools,
inside of bars, one hundred
rounds a minute, death is a
democracy, knows no color,
knows no sex, equality for
all, bullets pierce pliant flesh,
splinter bones, don’t tread on
me the gun nuts say, Columbine
and Parkland, Sandy Hook,
Aurora, thoughts and prayers,
fictitious care, death and
dying everywhere.

Martin H. Levinson is a member of the Authors Guild, National Book Critics Circle, PEN America, and the book review editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics. He has published ten books and numerous articles and poems. He holds a PhD from NYU and lives in Forest Hills, New York.

OH, YES, YOU CAN GET A MAN WITH A GUN: AMERICA CORRECTS ANNIE OAKLEY

by  George Salamon

"Guns recovered from Congressional shooter appear
legally purchased, FBI says." 

—NBC, June 15, 2017

They didn't see nothin' yet,
Those cowboys and cops
Behind the O.K. Corral in Tombstone
Back in the wild and woolly West in 1881
When the Earps and Doc Holliday
Exchanged 30 bullets in 30 seconds
With the Clantons and McLaurys
And three men lay dead in the alley
Behind the corral that defines our legends
Of guns, guts and glory.
Shucks, three dead doesn't even classify
As a mass shooting these days.
You've got to kill four for that, and that's peanuts
In the year 2017, when by June 16
We've recorded 6,592 dead and 13, 635 injured by gunshot,
With 302 children age 11 and under among them,
Some hit in the 156 mass shootings so far.
In Tombstone, back in 1881 you were supposed to
Check your gun at the sheriff's office or the Grand Hotel,
"To control the violence,"  True West Magazine tells me.
Now the sheriff is busy hunting the undocumented
And the Grand Hotel has moved to a suburban mall.


Author’s note: The figures are taken from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA).

George Salamon lives just outside the city of St. Louis, MO.

EGG RACE

by Devon Balwit

Image by Melodi2 via Answer Angels.

I write hate crime, mass shooting, extremist,
target, victim, second amendment, make
my students copy and pronounce, make
them lift their heads from their phones
and listen, all of us awkward, the ones
fasting for Ramadan, the ones who may
be gay, the ones who, secretly, do not care,
Orlando a place they’ve never heard of
in a country they barely know; they want
my language, not my history, and this lesson,
they can do without, my fumbling to do
justice to horror, while balancing the fragile
egg of blame in my tiny spoon, trying to dash
to the finish without letting it fall, homophobia,
intolerance, assault rifles, class ends and
I’ve taught something; none of us sure what.

Devon Balwit is a writer and teacher living in the Pacific Northwest.  Her work has appeared in TheNewVerse.News twice before. Her recent work has appeared or will soon in The Fog Machine, The Cape Rock, The Fem, Of(f) Course, drylandlit_press, and The Prick of the Spindle.