SEARCHING FOR A PRAYER

by Jacqueline Jules

400 Rounds of Ammunition Found at Pawnshop Connected to N.J. Killings: The police arrested the owner of the store in Keyport, N.J., on criminal weapons charges. [Their search] on Friday night … yielded six rifles, three handguns and one shotgun, in addition to the ammunition rounds, including hollow point bullets, which expand when they hit a target, according to officials. Three of the weapons were AR-15 style assault rifles, the same type of firearm used in the Sandy Hook, Las Vegas and Parkland mass shootings. —The New York Times, December 15, 2019

When the news buzzed on my phone:
6 Dead in Jersey City. Jewish Kosher Deli,
I was googling, searching for a prayer
to read Friday night at our yearly service
to remember the dead at Sandy Hook
with an invited speaker
who would tell our congregation
how little progress has been made
since those babies were gunned down
with the same kind of rifles
carried inside a kosher market
at the very moment I was searching
for a prayer, not too political
to read from the pulpit
at a service organized to keep
the memory of innocents alive.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, Stronger Than Cleopatra, and Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including TheNewVerse.News, The Rising Phoenix Review, What Rough Beast, Public Pool, Rise Up Review and Gargoyle. She lives in Arlington, Virginia. 

CLASS CARFARE

by M. A. Schaffner

"Decaying City" by FlatCap Illustration

Those without sons in penitentiaries
with money that they’ll never need for bail,
who schedule annual physicals on time
believing nothing bad can come of it,

may wonder at the ones who make their salads
or drive cabs in small towns and case pawn shops
for CDs to resell at flea markets,
or save pills from the emergency room

for when the pain stops and they can enjoy them.
Their grandfathers built the cities they know
in sordid sometimes dangerous decline,
connected to each other on highways

increasingly broken, or rails sagged by freight
searching for a promise or one big score,
aging fast and leaving their unused years
as a gift we have no one to thank for.


M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and Skirmish Magazine.  Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys.  Schaffner used to work as a civil servant, but now serves civil pugs.