SURVIVOR

by Ginny Lowe Connors

As of August 27, there had been 44 school shootings this year alone.

And then today...

No poem, no melody can ever drown out

the sounds that follow this child,

the pop pop of an automatic weapon,

screams of classmates,

friend, blabbermouth, violinist,

pencil-chewer, joker, soccer champ—

each one turned into a victim photo

on the evening news.

 

No cartoon, no billboard can ever block out

the sights that haunt this child,

the boy who fell on top of him, how he shook

and went still, the teacher shielding two girls

with her own body, the book on the floor,

pages slowly turning red.

 

How do we hold him,

how do we shelter

his splintered glass heart?

 

This is an American story

that has no end. A ten-year-old

goes to school one day and returns home,

just blinking and blinking.

He no longer speaks.

Ginny Lowe Connors is the author of six poetry collections, the most recent of which is White Sail at Midnight. Among her awards are the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize, the NFSPS Founders Award, Passager Poetry Contest Winner, and Poet of the Year (New England Association of Teachers of English). She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As publisher of her own press, Grayson Books, Connors has edited several poetry anthologies. A Board Member of the Connecticut Poetry Society, she is also Managing Editor of Connecticut River Review.

GREEN

by John Minczeski

On the news feed this morning,

on my phone’s small screen, two

children shot dead at morning Mass

before school. Others wounded

before the shooter turned the gun

on himself. Pardon me, readers,

this is not a poem, 

I must follow Adorno’s 

dictum. And yet, how refuse 

the poem, however prosaic

and filled with reportage. How,

gentle reader, can I look at the tree

in my front window, the one 

thinking of turning yellow,

that just yesterday made me think

life and beauty fill the same page.

This is not a poem, it is an outrage.

Twenty minutes from here,

maybe twenty five from my toast

and eggs sunny side up, the dead

and wounded children. Like ones

I taught in my career, whose eyes 

brightened with poems. 

A few clouds punctuate the sky. 

My younger brother has arrived

in Wyoming to drive my reclusive

older brother to California.

This is not a poem, it is a window

to my older brother so taken

with the beauty of the Tetons

he tried killing himself. At the end

of King Kong, a guy says it was

beauty that killed the beast. 

Therefore two brothers are in a car

driving west to a new normal,

and children with head wounds

are being treated at Hennepin General.

This is not a poem, this is a treatise

on teaching theodicy to six year olds.

This is me looking out the window

watching wind flip the leaves.

The green, the verde, que te quiero

verde of Lorca. Green leaves,

green children, que te quiero.

 

John Minczeski is the author of five collections as well as several chapbooks. His poems have appeared  previously in NVN as well as The New Yorker, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Minczeski worked as a poet in the schools for many years, and has taught at various colleges and universities around the Twin Cities. He served as president of the board for The Loft Literary Center when it was on the second floor of a bookshop in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis.

OF ALL THINGS

by Jennifer Schneider

Jennifer Crumbley, the mother of the teenager who killed four students pictured above—Madiyson Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14—at an Oxford, Michigan, high school in 2021, was found guilty Tuesday of all four counts of involuntary manslaughter in a novel legal case that stood as a test of the limits of who’s responsible for a school shooting. —CNN, February 6, 2024

that could have, should have,
been different—

the swish of a three-point shot. shooting stars, solar eclipses. the journey from girl to woman. 
balding men. camera flashes. grilled cheese on slices of Wonder. plucked daffodils. pinches of 
salt. something borrowed. something blue. wedding vows. bare feet on sand. morning waltzes. 

a day, anew.

dimes in jukebox machines. campouts under moonlit skies. crabbing on summer days. a Beatles’
whistle. yellow jackets on lavender petals. the semester’s last exam. anticipation of the daily 
mail. Billy Joel on the radio. parked sedans. Sunday drives with no destination.
 
birthday wishes.
 
candle wax. solar lights. hoops at midnight. blueberry-scented cravings at dawn. whole-grain
muffins before flight takeoff. puddle splashes. watercolor paints in tiny pots. a manual typewriter 
retrieved from a lost and found. the clang of bowling pins. green leaves. Ladybugs on sleeves. 
oversized football jerseys. soiled laundry awaiting freshly scented soaking.  
 
mugs of strawberry lemonade. promises handknit for safekeeping.
unfinished paperbacks. romances with happily-ever-after endings.
untied Converse laces. tied knots and coffee-fueled conversation.
scattered pumpkin seeds. rainbow kites. diaries with tiny keys.
lullabies sung off-key to future generations. goodnight kisses.
 
all the things
that could have, should have,
been different—

instead,
there was no interception —

a blank canvas. multiple strikes.
bullets lodged in metal hoops.
unrepairable tears. no spares.

shooting stars
amidst recurring nightmares.

of all the things,
that could have, should have
been different,

none were spared

Jennifer Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. Recent works include A Collection of Recollections, Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups.

A TEACHER’S PRAYER

by Michelle DeRose

Texas schoolchildren as young as four years old are being given Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon books, teaching them to “run, hide, fight” if a gunman enters their building. —The Guardian, May 25, 2023

If we must die in classrooms
barricaded by books 
stacked against doors, 
praying that the weight 
of words makes metal 
wade through air made
dense with sentences, 
that students find 
a window to safety 
with a tolerable drop, 
that we stop the onslaught 
just long enough for a few 
to return to their own rooms,

may we at least select the books.

Michelle DeRose has been teaching English at the college level for thirty-five years. Some of her most recent poetry can be found in As You Were: Military Experience and the Arts, Dunes Review, The Lakeshore Review, The Healing Muse, and Making Waves.

MESSAGE TO MY DAUGHTER: WE COULD HAVE DIED TODAY

by Marsha Owens

A child weeps while on the bus leaving the Covenant School. (Nicole Hester/The Tennessean/AP via The WashingtonPost

but we did not… because having finished elementary, middle, and high school, also college, you, thank God, are still alive, and then you majored in education, once a noble profession, spent years as  an elementary school teacher and, with experience, qualified to be an assistant principal, but awhile back, you left the teaching profession for good because you decided it was   not a hill to die on (my words, not yours), and I retired from teaching years ago carrying my life with me, so I say now ‘thank you, Jesus,’  though I doubt Jesus has anything to do with this carnage that tramples America and children and schools today, that declares guns rank higher on the scale of necessities than education,  teachers, and  children’s lives.

Marsha Owens is a retired teacher who lives and writes in Richmond, VA, and at times, along the banks of the beautiful Chesapeake Bay. Her essays and poetry have appeared in both print and online publications including The Sun, The Dead Mule, Huffington Post, Wild Word Anthology, Rat’s Ass Review, Rise Up Review, PoetsReadingtheNews, and The New Verse News. She is a co-editor of the poetry anthology Lingering in the Margins, and her chapbook She Watered Her Flowers in the Morning is available by Finishing Line Press.

PICTURE PROBLEM

by Rémy Dambron

Video footage (via The Texas Tribune) recorded inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde at 12:04 p.m. May 24. Authorities stormed the classroom at 12:50 p.m.

this picture

evidence we all see 

now for the first time

released 

officers’ long guns drawn

from behind ballistic shields 

formed up for an advance 

but shockingly at a halt

at least five men

sworn trained and well-armed

against the one 

*murderer of children still

the photo’s caption 

stating the time scene was 

captured

12:04pm

just underneath 

another detail displayed

authorities storm the classroom

12:50pm

forty-six minutes

they stood by to witness

as calls for help simply went

(unanswered)

as parents right outside 

against their wishes 

hands tied

by more armed men who just waited

for forty-six minutes

they wouldn’t act, only witness

another sickening school shooting

ensue

Rémy Dambron is a former English teacher now Portland-based poet whose writing focuses on denouncing political corruption and advocating for social/environmental justice. With the help of his chief editor and loving wife, his works have appeared in What Rough Beast, Poets Reading the News, Writers Resist, Words & Whispers, Spillwords, Robot Butt, and The New Verse News. 

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY

by Michelle DeRose

Trey Ganem's company, SoulShine Industries, created special caskets for 19 of the 21 victims killed at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas.

What music accompanies a Superman coffin?

What song will waft your boy over buildings

that block your sun, black your path

with shadow? Does the melody

to lull you to sleep exist, and 

will the hum of your own voice

be enough? Birdsong mocks, small 

throats on spindly legs, sparrows still

in the care of their father. Where 

will your boy fly now, outstretched 

arms and closed fists planing so fast, 

so fast, 

away from you?

Michelle DeRose teaches creative writing and Irish, African-American, and world literature at Aquinas College. Some of her recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Midwest Quarterly, Dunes Review, Sparks of Calliope, Making Waves, and The Journal of Poetry Therapy.

NEVER ENOUGH

by Judy Kronenfeld

The people embracing each other, wiping

tears from their eyes, kneeling

to place roses and carnations, 

the banner headlines, the when

is enough enough? Then the families

home alone after our national rituals,

the presidential visit. Now the children’s

bereft bedrooms, the stories slipping

down front pages and inside the newspaper,

then gone, now Absence just beginning

to take up residence, burrowing

in and in and in. 

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length collection of poetry Groaning and Singing was published by FutureCycle Press in February, 2022. Previous books include Shimmer (WordTech, 2012) and Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017). Her poems have appeared widely in journals including Cider Press Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Offcourse,  Slant, and Verdad.

ADRENALINE ATTACK

by Dana Yost

Barry Blitt

Awake all night.

Adrenaline attack.

Not like the attack

in Texas. Not twenty-one dead.

But fueled by that, 

this adrenaline attack.

What is it in us,

in Americans,

that makes it

OK? One mass

shooting after

another.

Some plead,

some pray.

Some say

leave it alone.

Ted Cruz

says don’t

politicize it.

Ted Cruz

needs a bruise.

It has to be politicized.

It has to be debated

in the public arena.

It has to have meaning,

this debate of ours,

or else it’s meaningless,

the senselessness

goes on.

Gunmen squeeze

their triggers

and children die.

The rest of the world

looks at us and

asks “why.”

We have no answer.

We have no answer.

So I stay awake,

shaking, fretting,

swearing. We pray,

we vow, we say

never again,

but they are hollow

phrases until

we put the gun lobby

down like a dog

with a hole in its gut,

which in any logical

world would be

the case: the gun

lobby allowing

these wounds

to open, to fester,

to be picked and pulled

at until the gut is

an open sore.

Awake all night.

Adrenaline attack

the day of a school

attack, the day we mourn

yet again the loss

of little lives.

Dana Yost was an award-winning daily newspaper journalist for 29 years. Since 2008, he has published eight books. His poetry has been published in numerous reviews and magazines, including The New Verse News. Yost is a three-time Pushcart nominee in poetry.

TEXAS IN HELL

by Robert Knox

The eyes of the others,

les autres

 

Hate mongering

Closed doors of the mind in self-panic

Race-pandering Congressional creeps

stalk the Halls of Hades

When? in God’s name?

 

A universal set of trigger-fingers

in circular execution

A lake of burning fire

Armed to the teeth = utterly unprotected

Gehenna on the dusty plain

 

Looking into the eyes

of the lost

No consolation in the knowing

 

Self-slaying America

Compelled to repeat the same self-torture

endlessly: forever

Infinite self-slaughter

 

An underworld of hate,

unholy perdition

Robert Knox is a poet, fiction writer, Boston Globe correspondent, and the author of the recently published collection of linked short stories, titled House Stories. As a contributing editor for the online poetry journal Verse-Virtual, his poems appear regularly on that site. 

TREE

by Katherine Smith

Kevin Siers, The Charlotte Observer, NC

The maples scatter their necklaces of seedpods

to the grass. My heart aches

for Texas where yesterday an eighteen-year-old

walked into a school and shot

 

eighteen children, more than one for each year of his life.

Anger spins inside me like wind-torn seeds.

All year long in the classroom I teach my students

to barricade the doors. The children are right

 

to ignore me. They go on chatting

while I point to tables and chairs.

My explanation will do no good

as the faces of congressmen and senators

 

at the NRA convention in Houston

do no good, pledging allegiance

chins up, wooden jaws squared as if relishing

yet another opportunity to stand rooted

 

like dead wood to their murderous cause.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

WE LIKE OUR FREEDOM

by Ginny Lowe Connors

And our steaks—we like them rare.

Our vengeance bloody and loud. Lightning bolts

aimed at the heart. That thrill. That satisfaction

when our rage explodes.

 

Ask the six-year-olds of Sandy Hook.

Ask their parents. Or anyone from Ulvalde.

Ask the stuffed bunny left behind

on the bed, one ear bent and frayed.

 

Tissue paper parachutes

drifting over the wastelands of our freedom—

that’s what the prayers became

of those in the Pittsburgh synagogue

and in the Fort Worth Baptist Church.

 

Nobody asks about the anonymous workers

who come in afterward to clean up the blood.

In the schools, the churches, the nightclubs.

The homes, the offices. Grocery stores.

That sludge, that slurry of hatred, cold sweat, malice—

how long must the smell of it linger?

 

I myself cannot eat steak. I cannot free myself

from the vision of a little boy racing a school bus. 

Something is happening to the field of wildflowers

I used to carry in my chest, asters and daisies, bees.

Summer sunlight. I’m full of holes.

The hummingbirds are escaping.

 

 

Ginny Lowe Connors taught English in a public secondary school for many years. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections, including her latest poetry book Without Goodbyes: From Puritan Deerfield to Mohawk Kahnawake (Turning Point, 2021). Her chapbook Under the Porch won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and she has earned numerous awards for individual poems. She is co-editor of Connecticut River Review and runs a small poetry press, Grayson Books.

DROWNED OUT

by Gregory Palmerino

The father of a first-grade girl killed in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School was discovered dead in an apparent suicide Monday morning at a town hall in Connecticut, police said. Authorities said the body of Jeremy Richman, 49, was found at about 7 a.m. at Edmond Town Hall in Newtown, a Connecticut community that has been scarred by the tragic school shooting that left 20 students and six staff members dead. The victims included Richman’s daughter, 6-year-old Avielle Richman. Richman, a neuroscientist who founded the Avielle Foundation in his daughter’s name, studied the brain and violence. The foundation had an office at the town hall. —The Washington Post, March 25, 2019. Photo: Jeremy Richman, father of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victim Avielle Richman, addresses the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission on Nov. 14 in Newtown, Conn. (Jessica Hill/AP via The Washington Post)

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

                        —Langston Hughes

You think
you know the sounds
I mean. I’ve heard your news,
so come and listen to me now,
father.

Of course,
it’s nice to think
the old wind weeps in tune,
fire mourns, the earth and water live.
So what.

I, too,
tried to embrace
listeners of that song:
the child is father of the man—
it’s gone.

It’s gone:
the Romantic
poet’s imagined place,
or all faith in one’s innocence.
It’s gone.

I hear
the echo now;
it repeats a child’s wail,
sounding notes too dumb to ignore
they’re dead.


Gregory Palmerino writes poetry in Connecticut's Quiet Corner, where he lives with his wife and three children. He is a past contributor to TheNewVerse.News.

THE FABULISTS

by Devon Balwit

Alex Jones, whose InfoWars website is viewed by millions, says that the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre was an elaborate hoax invented by government-backed “gun grabbers.”Credit: Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times. “In three separate lawsuits—the most recent was filed on Wednesday in Superior Court in Bridgeport, Conn.—the families of eight Sandy Hook victims as well as an F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting seek damages for defamation. The families allege in one suit, filed by Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder in Bridgeport, that Mr. Jones and his colleagues ‘persistently perpetuated a monstrous, unspeakable lie: that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged, and that the families who lost loved ones that day are actors who faked their relatives’ deaths.’” —The New York Times, May 23, 2018

In a post-truth world, your loved ones never died,
all 26 of them spirited back into bodies,
you, nothing more than performers of grief, hacks
for hire by unseen puppeteers. That pietà
where you held your six-year-old, confirming
his fatal wound, never happened, you expert
in manufacturing mourning. Your child’s brother
wonders how he can be told to doubt his memories,
wonders why anyone would suggest such an erasure.
Why would the President promise, I will never let
you down—but to the wrong ones, the deniers?
Fathers struggle to explain this to surviving children.
Mothers march grimly into the court house.
Twenty-six truths stand in stubborn admonishment.



Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from the Pacific Northwest. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

ALL FALL DOWN

by j.lewis

thoughts and prayers
get in the way so often now
it's hard to know when to think
and when to pray, or think about praying
or pray about thinking
as if the mere voicing
of the thoughtless prayer
or the prayerless thought
could make anything at all
better than bleeding kids

bleeding kids, kids bleating
parkland comes to mind
as the survivors don't just think
and don't just pray
but stand and challenge aloud
the bleating politicians
who thoughtlessly offer
through hypocritical lips
a silent prayer that they will not
have to stand up, stand against
their donors, take a stand
and watch the campaign coffers bleed

bleeding coffers, coffins bearing
faces bled white against white satin pillows
as if the pain of separation from life
could be soothed by the softness
smoothed by the softly falling tears
tears that tear apart the future
the past, the present as though
thoughts and prayers were knives
hurled against a wall of inaction
politics—inaction in action

guns in action, bolt action
action figures, police reaction
but not until the blood has spilled
thoughts, prayers, blood spilling
every day, every classroom

classes, classes, we all fall down

j.lewis is a Nurse Practitioner who has seen far too much violence in his lifetime to be quiet in the face of the disgrace of unchecked gun deaths in America.

LOOKING FOR GOOD NEWS

by Joan Mazza

Three days of steady rain, power flickers
off and on, pond overflowing. Flooded roads
and mud slides where trees are taken down
for another pipeline. Another school shooting

with ten dead. In Cuba a plane crashes. Over
one hundred dead. Lava ignites houses, cars
in a Hawaii subdivision. The acrid air is ash
and smells like rotten eggs. Bad news

headlines can flip you into a downward spiral.
I’m not prone to depression, not inclined
to expect the worst. The universe seems
eager to test optimists with an overdose

of cruel reality, reminds us we’re getting
old and no one is exempt from diminishment.
For now, I can read the news. Forgive me
for this day of shallowness, for enjoying excess,

the waste of resources on flowers, fancy hats,
buglers and British troops marching in full regalia.
I don’t care how much it costs. We need
a lift, a smile. We need to believe in love

stories, that one woman can defy predictions
of her limits, can become a princess, if not
queen. No one has to give her away. She’s
a grownup, can walk herself down the aisle.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and has twice been a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam), and her poetry has appeared in Rattle, Off the Coast, Kestrel, Slipstream, American Journal of Nursing, The MacGuffin, Mezzo Cammin, and The Nation.

7000 PAIRS OF SHOES

by David Spicer

You rest on the Capitol lawn

silent as the senators and congressmen

who ignore you and your former owners

you’re there protesting inaction and corruption

your owners’ names on placards near you

stay on that ground as long as you can

call for your owners to resurrect from the dead

to inhabit you to haunt the bought and paid for politicians

who blame mental illness local cops

unarmed teachers anything but the weapons

yes let their invisible feet wear you again

fly into the sky an invisible insurrection of gentle avengers

every time you see one of the lawmakers strolling down

Pennsylvania Avenue or the steps of the granite

gun church tell the ghosts to slap one of them

on his head knock some compassion into his apathy

perform aerial demonstrations guided by the ghosts

of the 7000 children and of teachers concertgoers,

dancers housewives grandmothers bus drivers

7000 pairs of you all colors and kinds red sneakers brown

slippers blue high heels yellow loafers white crocs

remain together escape from the hired sanitation workers

paid to collect you gather by the Potomac don’t let them

find you and diminish your power no transform your cloth

skin your rubber soles your canvas faces your leather toes

into new life defy science defy reality band together perform miracles

speak for the dead speak for their ghosts speak for future ghosts

oh shoes what will become of you don’t let them take you away

don’t let anybody dump you in the latest landfill and forget about you

whisper shout mutter sing yell into enough ears of enough saviors

who will pick you up and save you for another demonstration

on another lawn at the capitol of a state until you convince

the crooked men with their crooked souls and their crooked suits

to do something to do anything to stop stop stop their crooked silence

until you find more and more shoes thousands of more shoes hundreds

of thousands of more shoes who will join you and join an army

that cannot be stopped an army of 7000000 ghosts of 70000000

ghosts of victims who cannot speak anymore cannot laugh anymore

cannot run anymore cannot enjoy a day with cousins at a picnic on a lawn

much like the capitol lawn cannot return the smile of an infant

because two of the shoes are hers cannot think of a time

when guns didn’t exist cannot live in a land of guns any longer

David Spicer has poems in Chiron Review, Alcatraz, Gargoyle, Reed Magazine, Raw, The Ginger Collect, Yellow Mama, Ploughshares, The New Verse News, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of Everybody Has a Story and five chapbooks; his latest chapbook is From the Limbs of a Pear Tree, available from Flutter Press.

GOD GAVE US THE RIGHT

by Howard Winn

Photograph by Erik Ravelo from his 2013 sequence “Los Intocables” (“The Untouchables) featuring a variety of issues plaguing children around the world. “The right to childhood should be protected,” Ravelo writes.

to bear arms
announces the high priest of
the Church of the Rifle
and not a mere mortal
even though the government
wrote the laws that
support the dogma of this
Faith where the AK-47
has replaced the wine
and wafer that becomes
the blood and body of
the redeemer who kills
children without a qualm
as part of the new sacrament


Howard Winn has just had a novel Acropolis published by Propertius Press as well as poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

THRESHOLD

by Scott Bade

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is all
of them aligned in their identity a row
of matching matches each one the source
of course of course to the extinguishing
moment that follows a spectacle of what
we have to believe about what we can’t
believe. I’m not shaking anymore, neither
am I feeling much beyond the growl of dog
fattened on tables scraps lounging next to
the fire as someone pounds on the front
door their urgency their hands their rapid
fire knocking their pulling and pushing
and twisting the door handle it will not
give it won’t turn and then the turning
to living room window peering through
frantic hands binocularing now a palm
flat slapping window all heat red as you
guessed it a rose blooming in palm’s lined
lives & the dog’s ears inside perking
as the flames spread from room to room

Scott Bade earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at Western Michigan University (WMU). In addition to teaching at Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Scott is also the coordinator of the WMU Center for the Humanities. He is a former poetry editor for Third Coast Magazine and editorial assistant at New Issues Press. His poems have appeared in Fugue, Shadowgraph, H_NGM_N, Foothill and elsewhere. 

LIKE A BULLET HOLE

by Alexis-Rueal

What is left to write when everything
comes out looking like a bullet hole?
When everything sounds like
a coffin door closing.
How do you make room for a pen
in your hand when you are too busy hugging
toddler nephews tight and thanking
God and fate that they’re too young for school?
This time.
How many synonyms are left for despair
and fury? Do they even mean anything, anymore?
How does the poet write
when it has all been written before?
How does the poet write when they know
they will write it again tomorrow?

Alexis-Rueal is a Columbus, Ohio poet whose work has appeared in online and print journals throughout the US and in Europe. She has appeared in festivals and venues throughout Ohio and Kentucky. Her first full-length collection I Speak Hick was published by Writing Knights Press in 2016.