HEIDEGGER'S STOPWATCH

by Zumwalt

AI-generated video created by Nightcafé for The New Verse News

The chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. —The New York Times, September 12, 2026 Sunday dinner in Billings, Montana—
Mr. Smith set fire to four generations
just one day after a quintuple homicide bonfire
in Forest Grove, Oregon
incinerated three generations
and a few terrified pets.

No AI assistance required.

In Lebanon, under de-escalation,
27 dead, 69 wounded in 70 hours.
In Iran, an errant missile
crashed a wedding,
wiping out two children,
destroying and injuring many more.

No AI assistance required.

Iranians compiled open-source data
to create effective targeting handbooks
against American naval positions
while Yemen-based Houthi cells
developed software for
ballistic missiles and guided rockets.

AI assistance required
and provided effectively by Claude AI.

We do our best to teach little Lucas
right and wrong, and how to cross the street.
We put in the hours at jobs that
fray our nerves, and when we feel like
arguing, one of us takes a walk outside
to ensure Lucas never hears us fight.

No AI assistance required.

I read that Jacob Coxon
(previously employed by competitor OpenAI)
left Anthropic and upcoming IPO riches
to tell us that he and colleagues
believe that AI could kill us all
by the end of the decade.

I asked Grok, this Saturday morning,
to fill me in: it tried to reassure me,
telling me such rumors have circulated for years.
"No AI system has wiped out
(or is currently wiping out) humanity."
My shoulders and neck tensed and shuddered.

I scrolled the news on my smartphone.
Anthropic's CEO published 3800 words,
one paragraph about AI curing disease,
the next several dozen paragraphs detailing
some of AI's destructive skills and the CEO's proposals—
steps to slow down AI and apply theoretical safeguards.

Some AI assistance may be required.
Assistance from corporations and world leaders required.

I prayed and remembered my grandmother's words

that God always answers prayers: "yes" or "no" or "maybe."

Sounded like this was a maybe.

Zumwalt’s poetry examines the intersection of identity, instability, and the mechanics of perception. Recent work has appeared or will appear in The New Verse News, Heavy Feather, San Diego Poetry Annual, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Society of Classical Poets, Light, and additional journals.

MASS SHOOTING #16

19300 block of Rensellor Street, Livonia, MI, 

June 10, 2026

by Ron Riekki

Ron Riekki has covered every mass shooting in Michigan since July 2025 for The New Verse News.

The Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network offers a 24-hour helpline at 1-800-241-4949.

And those in a mental health crisis can call 988 instead of 911.

“With my ear to the door

of my cell.  And my want

like a comb in my hair.”

—Jane Huffman,

“Failed Sestina”

 

“I’m sure as heat,

as surety.

The bleed”

—Jane Huffman,

“Surety”

 

“Police say there is no ongoing threat to the public.”

Are you kidding me?  Michigan has had more than

100 mass shootings since 2020.  You don’t think it’s

an ongoing threat?!  I can’t imagine a more ongoing

 

threat to the public.  It’s another family annihilation.

Yes, another family annihilation.  Another.  Another

family.  Another family annihilated.  Anti-Christed,

hated, non-mothered, to not, knotted, no other Tues-

 

days, shooter unsteady.  When you search “Livonia”

on the Poetry Foundation website, it says “0 results.”

When you search “Livonia” on the Gun Violence

Archive website, you get 31 results since 2014—

 

31 shootings here since 2014.  Only one of them a mass

shooting.  I’m at the mass shooting.  The house, small.

The houses nearby, small.  A small man sits on a small

porch, a tiny porch, broken wooden rails, his skin also

 

broken so that I ask what’s wrong, bandages on both

arms, the look like previous bleeding, bruises, purpura,

petechiae.  The feel of peripeteia, bathos, pathos, cath-

arsis, anagnorisis, a chorus of country music cranked

 

in some a--holes truck parked mid-street, blocking traffic,

the guy getting out, going to the memorial in front of

the house, standing there, staring at it, has enough, goes

back to his truck and then squeals the tires loooong with

 

the truck in park, attention-seeking, angry, this hyper-mask,

this loudness, this performativity, and then he floors it,

truck swerving, almost hitting cars on the side of the road,

and he’s gone.  I talk to Doug, a neighbor two doors down

 

from the mass shooting.  So many of these guys who live

near the mass shootings I go to look like pirates—sea-salt

skin, Blackbeard-types with white beards, beer-belly skinny.

Doug tells me his last name and, swear to God, he actually

 

has the same last name as a famous pirate, a 1600s buccaneer.

He smokes, looking like a survivor, tells me that on Tuesday,

the day of the mass murders, he was in the backyard with

the family that was killed, helping them set up a pool.  I say,

 

“A pool.  And then it becomes a pool of blood.”  Doug says

in a voice that combines hip-hop’s Drake and outlaw pirate

Sir Francis Drake, “I should kick you in the shins.”  He’s not

joking.  He tells me of seeing the corpse of the mother killed

 

by the shooter, tells me the shooting happened at 5 p.m.-some-

thing, but the bodies weren’t taken out until 11:30 p.m.-ish.

Why would they leave the bodies there for that long?

Fingerprints, detectives, a cop telling him, “This is a crime

 

scene,” Doug staying on his property.  And the cop cars.

Cop car after cop car.  No place to park.  He points to a car

on the street, says, “That’s Sterling’s car.”  58-year-old.

The father.  Shot and killed by his son who shot his mother,

 

his brother, and his brother’s girlfriend.  Doug tells me that

they’re slowly towing their cars away.  I never thought of

the cars.  How the owners are all dead.  Something I’d never

even think of.  He tells me how long it took them to take

 

the bodies away, how long it’s taking them to tow the cars.

Doug wears an ALICE’S RESTAURANT WOODSIDE

CALIFORNIA T-shirt, black-and-white.  It’s a black-and-

white neighborhood.  The shooter, white.  Family, white.

 

All dead.  The killer looking dead in news video footage of

him in front of the judge who denied him bail.  A face that,

honestly, the first time I saw it, I thought of severe substance

abuse disorder.  A face that made me think of abuse, and of

 

disorder.  Doug pulls his shirt out like pro basketball players

do after scoring a critical basket, says, “Guthrie,” proud,

a song about cops, about crime, the longest song I’ve ever

heard.  Doug tells me of his wife calling him, telling him

 

she heard gunshots.  Doug telling her to hide in the bath-

tub if it continues.  The song has the lyrics of kill kill kill

kill.  Such strange lyrics.  Such a strange life.  Telling your

wife to hide in a bathtub if the gunshots continue.  Doug

 

tells me the mass shooter “didn’t talk much,” was “quiet,”

but “I’d joke with him every once in a while,” like yelling

at him to “buy me a Slurpee!”  Doug tells me the mother

planted flowers.  It’s the exact same talk as the last family

 

annihilation I went to, the neighbor in Grand Rapids telling

me about the woman’s love of gardening.  These mass

shooters are killing women who love to garden.  I can’t

imagine anything more peaceful, more grounded, paired

 

with such horror.  This life makes no sense, because of all

the death.  That pairing.  Doug says, it “seemed like a normal

day,” the day of the mass murders.  He tells me no bullets

came towards his home.  The killer used a semiautomatic

 

rifle, shoots five to thirty rounds with up to five bullets per

second.  You can kill five people in one second with a semi-

automatic rifle.  Who would own that?  Online, it says semi-

automatic rifles are for “hunting, sport shooting, self-defense,”

 

and, apparently, for mass shootings.  They forget to mention it.

I’m going to be honest: Fuck the NRA.  That’s my one

curse word I’ll allow.  The three-letter curse word: NRA.

The nonrandomness of these shootings, how repetitive

 

they are, automatic, unraveling daily, nonrational, enraging,

the pain they cause unratable.  Sunrays hit the house, punch

our skin.  Doug tells me he’s on blood-thinners, the reason

for his contusions, his arms covered in red, blue, purple,

 

green, yellow discolorations.  Semiautomatic rifles were

invented by a German, were used by the Nazis in WWII.

The killer’s last name is Pierce: to make a hole or opening

in.  Perforate.  Penetrate.  The penitentiary awaits.

 

I remember when I worked in the prison system, an inmate

in there who was doing back-to-back-to-back life sentences—

he would have to die, get resurrected, die again, resurrect,

and then die again, and then he could get out on his fourth

 

life.  I think of the 1.7 million men in prison in the U.S.

The prison system is hungry for angry men.  Its stomach

aches for angry men.  It’s “nearly impossible” for men

to get into therapy—the cost, the therapists who work

 

Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and don’t

realize that’s when people work, that they can’t go to

therapy if you schedule your hours for when they work,

the therapists who “refuse to see men,” the stigma, markets

 

of anger, the MMA marketing, the UFC marketing, WWE,

the road-rage retaliation that’s stuffed into men’s brains, how

boring it is, how polluted.  Doug tells me the shooter killed

his brother in his bedroom, his brother’s girlfriend the same

 

bedroom, killed his parents in their backyard, Doug realizing

the mother was dead because she’d “been there for an hour

and a half,” lying there, motionless, when he saw her, the body

in the sun, the body “on the patio.”  Doug tells me “Tuesday

 

night, I prayed and cried and cried and prayed,” that he “did

not sleep well.”  He tells me it took “two days” for their “cat

to come out of the basement.”  The shooter even shot one

of the dogs in the leg.  Doug says, “I didn’t know he got

 

any guns in the house.”  I ask Doug if he has a gun.  “No,

my wife won’t let me.”  I ask him if his wife won’t let him

because so many guns, I find, are used to kill the partner.

It seems there’s nothing safer than ensuring there are no

 

guns at all in a home.  I talked to a therapist who told me

that gun ownership is a sign of mental health disorder,

another therapist who told me how often you find that

those with substance use disorders are gun owners, as if

 

they go hand-in-hand.  If I was married to someone, I think

the first thing I’d do is throw out any guns in the home,

because I’d prefer not to be shot.  But that’s just me.

I want to tell Doug that his wife is smart, brilliant.

 

I ask Doug what needs to happen to improve things.  He says,

“The yahoo in the White House, he doesn’t do anything

about gun control,” adds, “I don’t even like saying his name.”

Doug tells me he’d own a gun though, if it wasn’t for his wife.

 

Why?  “Protection.”  He says the problem is “alpha males,

macho males,” says the answer is if we “cut the trigger finger

off” of these mass shooters, takes his free hand and acts like

he’s holding a saw, his finger sticking out, pretending he’s

 

invisibly sawing off his finger, adds, “background checks”

would help.  I tell him the mass shooter had no criminal

background, no reported mental health issues.  At least

that’s what the news reports.  I see a neighbor pull up,

 

lives in the house right next to the mass shooting.  I go

over.  The guy reminds me of Ichabod Crane, how I

imagined him when I read the story.  He’s nervous,

visibly, very.  We talk.  He’s guarded.  A full family

 

was murdered feet from where we’re standing.  Even

his dog in the window looks scared.  I say this to him.

I asked if he talked to the shooter.  Yes.  I ask what

he was like.  He starts to tell me, then backtracks.

 

He’s jittery.  He tells me not to put that, tells me

to put he was “nice,” that the mass shooter was

always “nice.”  He repeats the word “nice.”  He

doesn’t want me to put what he was originally

 

going to say, except I don’t know what he was

going to originally say, just that now he wants me

to put that the killer was “nice,” and I have this

revelation—all these times I’ve seen the news

 

where neighbors, friends, family of the mass

murderer gets asked to describe the killer, they

always say something like that, that he was “nice”

and I realize now, for the first time, that it’s B.S.

 

He’s saying the killer was nice, because he’s nervous,

noticeably, almost exaggeratedly, a definite PTSD, eyes

darting, restless.  He doesn’t want me putting anything

down that might make the killer pissed off, a killer who,

 

I remind him, will most likely be doing life in prison

with no parole.  He tells me his name, but I tell him

I can use a nickname, but he says, no, I can use his

name, but I won’t, simply because of all sixteen mass

 

shootings I’ve gone to, I can tell he’s really honestly

fearing for his life from this guy who’ll probably be

incarcerated forever, but I understand.  It’s right next

to his home, his dog in the window, anxious for him

 

to go inside, his dog having heard the gunshots.  Can

dogs have PTSD?  Hell yes.  My parents owned a rescue

dog and that thing was more hypervigilant than an ex-

Marine.  I walk over to the memorial in front of the house.

 

I notice the neighbor watching me.  He mentioned that

he’s in therapy.  I think, Good.  I wish more men would

get into therapy.  I wish more men weren’t seduced by

the small-penis pseudo-cure of gun ownership.  I wish

 

more men were actually like Ichabod Crane and less

Headless Horseman—brainless, violent, ghoulish; I think

of the Hell that awaits the mass murderer, what happens

in prison, the sons in there, the poison of prison, the way

 

you pay and pay and pay and pay, an inmate one time

telling me that he taped books to his chest when he slept

at night, worried about being stabbed in his sleep, another

inmate telling me he didn’t go to the chapel because so

 

many men were raped in there, and I remember this row

of toilets, toilet after toilet after toilet that you’d see

through the glass, on the way with the walk to the chapel

and how all these men would be sitting, shitting, in full

 

sight, no privacy, and the chapel in back, a guard taking me,

and this intricate Jesus Christ depiction, incredible, detailed,

even expensive looking, carved, careful, Jesus with so much

blood on his wrists.  So much.  I kept staring at all the blood.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice. 

MASS SHOOTING #13

900 block of Worden Street, Grand Rapids, MI, January 27, 2026.

 

“The man charged in the killings of a Grand Rapids mom and her two teenage sons was found competent to stand trial on Tuesday." WZZM_, March 24, 2026

  

by Ron Riekki

 

Photos: Victims Michael Kilpatrick, 13 (right), Jacqueline Neill (middle) and Cameron Kilpatrick, 15 (left).

 

 

“Since the only thing we can be sure of is the abyss”

—Christine Stephens-Krieger,

“What’s Important”

 

“—Only the monstrous anger”

—Wilfred Owen,

“Anthem for Doomed Youth”

 

 

A golf course pulls my attention, the perfection

of the day, golfers growing around every hole.

I drive to another mass shooting, transported

 

with each block slowly getting lower and lower

on the socioeconomic scale, as if it was designed

that way.  It was designed that way.  I park in

 

front of the home where—according to online—

a “family annihilation” occurred.  That phrase.

My God.  The news reports the mass shooter

 

moved into his fiancée’s home; less than a week

later, after he was texted that she wanted him

to leave, he killed her, then went into her sons’

 

bedroom and killed them in their beds.  Because

she wanted him to leave.  ‘Family annihilation.’

The nausea of that term.  I think of John Donne’s

 

holy sonnets: Death, be not proud.  These are

unholy moments, unholy poems.  A Mom, killed,

because she asked him to leave.  They met on

 

Tinder.  What a bizarre name for a dating site?

A combustible, flammable, funeral-pyre word.

One son, 13.  The other son, 15.  The man who

 

killed her called her “Bunny.”  He went by

the nickname “Charlie Brown.”  Killed in cold

blood.  Could you imagine witnessing that?

 

And next door to the house where it happened

is another house.  And on the screened porch,

a woman sits: “Tiffany.”  I ask if she’d be OK

 

with talking about what happened.  She’s not

OK, but will talk.  Looks troubled.  “Sad,” she

says, “Sad.”  She adds, “It’s sad and disturbing.”

 

Says, “This street has a label.”  Kids play

across the street.  The house that the murders

happened looks grey, old, tired.  Tiffany says

 

she didn’t cry when she found out.  “I was in

the bathroom, getting ready for work when

I heard the gunshots.”  She says she thought

 

it was ICE, didn’t report it, saying she thought

it was police, can’t report the police to the police.

She says she found out what happened when she

 

got to work.  She’s dressed in purple scrubs,

says she’s a “caregiver.”  She’s kinder maybe

than any person I’ve spoken to yet.  A softness.

 

This caregiver next to a house with multiple

murders.  She says she feels safe, even now.

“I feel safe wherever I go.”  She adds, “You

 

just never know.”  I ask for solutions.  A one-

word answer: “Education.”  I ask for more

info.  “There’s nothing here,” she says, says

 

“You have to go far to get to anything.”

I talk to her through a screen.  I’ve talked

to so many people at these mass shootings

 

through screens, so many gas-station clerks

behind bulletproof glass and screens, telling

me they don’t want to talk.  Tiffany is talkative,

 

open, hope-filled, where you can feel it, but,

also, stoic-calm.  Her appearance reminds me

of Tiffany Haddish, a similar smile.  On

 

the door, a sign: PLEASE DELIVER

PACKAGES INSIDE THE PORCH.

“The kids need mentors that look like them.”

 

I talk about incarceration and how mentors

can be absent with almost 400,000 black men

incarcerated.  That’s more than the entire

 

population of Cleveland.  Off to the side,

I hear a voice.  It’s her daughter “Stephanie”

who I didn’t even notice, so still.  She says

 

we need to talk about prisons.  I ask what

about them.  It’s quiet.  There’s so much

to say.  I ask what we do.  “I pray about it,”

 

Tiffany says.  She says, “It’s sad to look

at the house.”  The house is right there.

Not yards, not feet.  Inches.  Right there.

 

“She had a rose garden,” Tiffany says.

That sinks in.  The humanity of it.  How

this woman was gentle with the earth.

 

I think of going in back to see it, but

never do.  We talk about being sick and

tired.  The disease of exhaustion that is

 

the gun problem in the U.S.  I say that,

really, it’s impressive, how much we’ve

mastered creating a violent world.  There

 

are so many things that have to be in place

to have this many shootings, like America

is manufacturing this problem, which it is,

 

with its ten million firearms made per year.

Gun sales go up after mass shootings.  I

want to throw up when I think about it.

 

I mention how many of these mass shootings

are poor young black men killing poor young

black men and Tiffany says, “I want to argue

 

that.”  She says the shooters aren’t black.

I ask her if the shooter next door was black.

He was.  The fiancée, white.  Her children,

 

white.  The shooter, 44.  I say it’s not typical,

but it’s also Grand Rapids, explain that when

I go to inner-city mass shootings, it tends to

 

be blacks killing blacks.  “Gangs,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.  I ask if the issue is gangs,

but she talks about domestic violence,

 

which, truth be told, is what this is.  It’s

as if the city itself is distinctive.  The gang-

related mass shootings of Flint, Saginaw,

 

Detroit, Muskegon.  And the white male

mass shooter in Grand Blanc.  And this

interpersonal violence of Grand Rapids.

 

The cities themselves part of the narrative.

Tiffany talks about “the violent system”

of America.  Her daughter adds that it’s

 

a “mental health” problem.  It’s true.

It’s a secret of the mental health field,

but there are retention-based programs

 

where therapists are rewarded for having

high retention rates.  Who has low retention?

Patients who are people of color, poor,

 

men, the disabled, those with deep trauma.

Who has high retention?  Wealthier white

female abled patients.  So therapist who see

 

disabled poor black males can have their

hours reduced, punished for seeing those

clients.  And those who serve wealthy white

 

female abled clients can get rewarded with

more clients.  Loop.  I spoke with a therapist

at University of Michigan where I asked

 

about the lack of training with therapists

in terms of healing childhood sexual trauma

(CST), a complaint I heard talking to a circle of

 

black men in Detroit, and the U of M

therapist told me the problem isn’t that

therapists aren’t trained in CST, he said

 

it’s that therapists aren’t trained in trauma

at all, that they avoid it.  It helps with your

retention.  What’s the cost?  Everything.

 

“We need to talk about it more,” Stephanie

says.  “Why are we cutting funding?”

Tiffany says the problem is “weak men”

 

who “can’t accept rejection,” says, “You

just destroyed three lives and numerous

other family members.”  She says this

 

to the house next door, as if the house

next door is anthropomorphized.  They

talk about how they’re both single, don’t

 

have interest in dating.  “They were driving

me crazy,” she says, “so I left.”  She talks

about loneliness.  Her daughter does too.

 

I’m lonely as well.  I don’t say this.

Perhaps it’s safer to be lonely.  Tiffany

says she’s too busy with her own goals.

 

Her daughter talks about her dreams

of becoming an engineer.  I talk to her

about Michigan Reconnect, how you can

 

get a free Associate’s in Michigan.  She

looks excited.  I tell her about the Go Blue

Guarantee, how you can also get a free

 

Bachelor’s in Michigan.  Then I tell her

it gets better, that you can also get a free

PhD at multiple universities in Michigan

 

if you have the grades.  She tells me she

didn’t know this.  Their cat comes up

and looks at me, a dirty look, a look of

 

You better not mess with us.  I say this

to Tiffany and Stephanie.  They say

it’s their “guard cat,” that his name is

 

“Jason.”  “Named after Jason Voorhees,

from Friday the 13^th.  We laugh.  The cat

doesn’t, slowly strolls away from me.

 

There’s a crash inside the home, like a dish

falling.  Tiffany goes inside.  I hear this

little young voice yell, “She hit me!”

 

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.