OCTOBER 7

by Tammy Smith

Three years
since the massacre—
short but long
enough to remember
the horrors of captivity,
being stripped of safety
at home and abroad,
in our houses of worship,
on stinky subway platforms,
afraid to wear a yarmulke,
hang a mezuzah,
slipping a Jewish star
on a gold chain
beneath a business suit.

Hope is harder to find
standing among crowds
of hostile strangers
blocking the closing doors.

Tammy Smith is a licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Thimble, ONE ART, Bending Genres, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. She received honorable mentions in the Journal of New Jersey Poets 2026 Poets Prize and the 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards.

MASS SHOOTING #12

300 block of West Biddle Street, Jackson, MI, May 9, 2026

“Jackson Police investigate afternoon shooting that injured 4 locals.” —Mlive

by Ron Riekki

“watched his childhood;

Amid strange faces and strange forms.”

—Mary Torrans Lathrap,

“The Wanderer's Grave”

“We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.”

—MacReady (played by Kurt Russell)

in The Thing (1982)

 

“freedom which is a crater

I keep falling in.”

—Major Jackson,

“On Disappearing”

            i: Prologue

 

Between Fourth of July 2025 and Memorial Day 2026,

there have 837 separate shooting incidents in Michigan,

In 325 days, there have been 15 mass shootings here,

about one mass shooting every 22 days.  I started going

 

to mass shootings on July 4 last year.  On my birthday,

mid-May, we reached 1,000 people shot in Michigan in

just 11 months.  Currently, 1,042 people have been shot.

I have only one more month to go.  I can’t do it anymore.

 

 

            ii: Dialogue

 

On the way to Jackson, I pass a park, and a bail bonds office.

This is my first mass shooting I’ve gone to where the mass

shooter is a female, her bond set at a quarter of a million

dollars.  A May 9 headline reads “Attempted murder charges

 

against shooting suspect dropped shortly after her arraignment.”

The victims: a 21-year-old male shot twice in the chest and

once in the arm, 28-year-old male shot in the face and arm,

25-year-old female shot in the pelvis, and 23-year-old female

 

shot in the arm.  This doesn’t feel like a poem.  I don’t feel

like writing a poem.  I don’t feel sometimes driving to these

mass shootings.  The repetition.  The petitions that do nothing.

Worse.  It seems to be spreading to all of us.  A virus.  I feel

 

disgusted.  I discuss this with a woman who lives less than

a block from the shooting.  I’m talking to a female about

a female mass shooter who just shot two females in the arm

and, of all places, the pelvis.  The symbolism.  The city bright

 

green today.  I talk to her at the foot of her garden and

there are two men nearby.  Anna and Dan and an unnamed

man who reminds me of Seasick Steve (the musician whose

name I thought was Steve Gone Wild, but is actually Steve

 

Gene Wold, half-guitarist-wizard half-pirate); his doppel-

gänger floats in and out of the discussion of danger and

anger and it’s very city focused, talk of Romulus, Detroit,

Jackson.  And the three of them seem like they’d fit in with

 

the entourage of Action Bronson (of F*ck, That's Delicious

fame).  They tell me Jackson needs more community gardens.

On the way here, I passed a bike park, another park, a b-ball

court, and then the abandoned park near their home with its

 

rusty swings and weeds and graffitied slide and need of

upkeep and another basketball court, but this with no nets.

They tell me it’s the youth, that we didn’t do mass shootings

when we were young, tells me he handled a gun at age 8,

 

has a gun now, says “the problem is the access.”  Or is it

the excess?  Its infinity.  ∞.  I ask this.  He says they need gun safety.

I ask how gun safety is going to help a mass shooter.  It seems

gun safety is an oxymoron.  We talk more on how “it’s a vicious

 

cycle,” and when change is attempted “they get roadblocked

by the government.”  Anna says the problem is the chronic

violence of TV, video games, music, movies.  We’re not far

from Mount Evergreen Cemetery.  I don’t know about

 

the mount, but there’s green everywhere today.  I feel jaded.

It feels I’ve had this discussion before.  Gun owners telling me

there’s too much access to guns.  ?  They’re nice.  They’re open.

They’re enjoying the summer day.  One heard the gunshots.

 

One didn’t.  They tell me those who were shot know who did it,

but they don’t want to speak.  News says people are afraid

to talk, worried about getting protection.  There’s apparently

40 unsolved murders in Jackson.  We chitchat.  Wide open.

 

I worry America is guns.  Guns won.  Hell, it’s confusing.

It is Hell.  Kamala Harris, a Democrat, brags about owning

a Glock.  The Republican President can’t own a gun

due to his felony conviction.  They talk about how you’re

 

safe if you keep your nose clean, if you “stay away from

trouble,” from “people congregating.”  Perhaps we’re saying

you can prevent mass shootings by simply staying away

from people.  The myth that COVID reduced mass shootings.

 

We trade one virus for another.  I’m tired.  We don’t have any

solutions.  Or maybe we have too many solutions.  There’s no

silver bullet.  The conversations are triggering.  You try to offer

up solutions but get shot down.  We need to set our sites on

 

something better.  The language is gun-drowned.  Steve

tells me I need to go, that the dog wants to come out—

Zeus, their German Shephard.  He tells me the dog’s hairs

are standing on end, that he wants to come after me, that

 

it’s best to leave.  As I’m walking away, he shouts to my

backside, “If he doesn’t know you, he’s very aggressive!”

 

 

            iii: Epilogue

 

The realization, driving home, is that this wasn’t the only

mass shooting in Michigan on May 9, another in Muskegon.

 

And, on May 9, more mass shootings in Reddick, Florida,

and in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  We’re perfecting mass

shootings.  We’re teaching the normalization of mass

shootings.  Gun purchases increase after mass shootings.

 

The beauty is the ugliness.  Gun violence and capitalism

F*ck each other.  But there’s this strange revelation that it’s

the gun owners who get killed.  It’s gun owners who have

increased suicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

 

increased homicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

increased accidental shootings in their homes.  Safety comes from

actual safety.  It’s a horror film.  “Don’t go in!”  Guns are the thing.

And guns are The Thing.  It.  And It.  “The horror, the horror.”

 

 

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

ON THE MORNING THE CITY CHANGED ITS WALK

by Khayelihle Benghu

 

 

 

 

On the morning the march moved through Johannesburg,
shop gates came down early.


Metal shutters lowered like tired eyelids


before the day had fully spoken.
Foreign-owned stores locked their doors


before noon,


keys turning twice


as if once was no longer enough


to believe in safety.
The taxi driver changed his route again,


avoiding streets where voices


had grown sharper than traffic,


where even the robots seemed unsure


who they were guiding anymore.
No one calls it fear,


but everyone adjusts their walking speed.


Everyone becomes a little more careful


with how they look at strangers.
Somewhere, a shopkeeper counts what might be lost


stock, rent, the years built behind a counter.


Somewhere else, a protester counts what has already been taken


jobs, space, the weight of being seen.
And between them,


the city keeps breathing uneven, uncertain,


but still holding everyone inside it.
A child watches from a doorway


that is neither open nor closed.


A flag lifts, then folds back into itself


as if unsure what it is becoming.
No one says the same story.


But everyone carries the same heat


under their skin.
Later, when the streets grow quiet again,


when footsteps return to ordinary distances,


there is still this question left behind:
how do we live here together


without teaching ourselves


to fear each other's names.

Khayelihle Benghu is a South African writer and an author of The Names We Carry. She explores the themes of resilience grieve, silence and love in every day setting.

GRACE IN MINNEAPOLIS IN THE AGE OF ICE

by Barbara Draper

It’s afternoon as I sit looking out the library window— 

across the street a testy wind snaps a line-up of flags— 

 

the first for Ukraine, the next to remember the MIAs and POWs, 

the next to bring them home, and finally, an American flag.

 

Earlier this morning as I stood on a corner, a whistle 

around my neck, on look-out for ICE,

 

an Hispanic mom, holding her daughter’s hand, 

walking her safely to school, 

 

passes by, touches my sleeve 

and thanks me. 

 

Me of the privileged, white variety, 

grandmotherly, sure in my safety. 

 

Tears welled up— 

for her or for me? 

 

The unfairness, the enigma, the grace she gave 

with her great big heart. She touching me.

Barbara Draper’s poems have been published in Poetry East, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth and Sow’s Ear. She has authored one book of poems, Sometimes a Door. She lives in the Minneapolis area and is active in climate change work as well as running after three grandchildren.

QUESTIONS

by Katy Z. Allen

Cartoon by Clay Jones

President Donald Trump declared Wednesday evening that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality,” brushing aside international law and other checks on his ability to use military might to strike, invade or coerce nations around the world. –The New York Times, January 8, 2026

But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread out… —Exodus 1:12
 
asking yourself a question / that's where resistance starts // and then asking someone else, the same question —Remco Campert, "Someone Asks the Question"

The money began to disappear

and the people, 

adherence to the law,

whether ours or everyone’s,

environmental protection,

childcare and other services,

a sense of safety and security,

more money,

more people.

The killing and wounding began—

always with an explanation—

adherence to personal morality alone 

prevailed.

Yet questions were spoken,

whispered and shouted, 

in the open and behind closed doors, 

among friends and in public, 

on airwaves and in cyberspace,

by children and by grandparents, 

by the energized and by the exhausted,

in solitude or to another

question were repeated, 

multiplied 

and spread out,

until 

they were on the lips of every caring woman 

and child 

and man,

every caring human being.

And that was the moment that led,

in the end,

to the beginning.

Katy Z. Allen is a lover of the more-than-human world, poet, retired rabbi of an outdoor congregation, former healthcare chaplain, co-founder of a Jewish climate organization, and eco-chaplain. She has been writing in one context or another all her life. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in print and online in such places as Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, and Art on the Trails: Number 9. Her book, A Tree of Life: A Story in Word, Image, and Text was published by Strong Voices Publishing.

SCHOOL WELLNESS TIPS

by Andrew G. Scott

Here’s a hack

from the school counselor

to stay positive this year.

“Include personal wellness goals

in your passwords.”

Great idea.

DoNotGetShotInSchool26!

Andrew G. Scott is a pen name for a public school teacher who has decided to share an inside view of public education in the United States.