THE ALPHABET IS NOT ENOUGH

by Miceala Morano

From an experimental alphabet by Max Morin combining real paintings with digital manipulation. In collaboration with Jim Lepage.

We learn, but we never do. 

A as in apple, B as in ball, C as in cat,

D as in the desks we shield soft bodies with. 

Rewind, repeat. A as in active shooter situations.

B as in blood, scarlet staining the halls. 

Rewind, repeat. A as in America, is this 

what you meant by red, white and-

B as in blue lips, C as in CPR. 

I am shielding their bodies in the grocery store, 

in the classroom, in my nightmares each night. 

It is still not enough to protect them. 

C as in clear backpacks. D as in 

don’t make a sound. E as in ending, 

as in breath interrupted. Rewind, repeat

repeat, repeat. A as in active shooter,

F as in freedom, delegated to weapons 

and never to women. We throw our alphabet

at the bullets, B for books, C for chairs, D for desks, 

the classroom deconstructed into a war zone, 

our breaths deconstructed into silence. 

A as in America, never learning. B as in bullets, 

falling like rain.

Miceala Morano is a writer from the Ozarks whose work is published or forthcoming in Berkeley Fiction Review, Eunoia Review, Kissing Dynamite, The Shore, Gone Lawn, and more. Find her on Twitter @micealamorano .

HOW I WILL RAISE MY SON SO HE DOESN’T BECOME THE NEXT MASS SHOOTER

by Jared Povanda

I will shower him with love. 

I will listen to him

and encourage him to cry

while teaching him how to 

use the potty.

I will read to him about 

kind animals: the mouse and the rabbit 

and how they’ve never hurt a soul.

I will only let him play E-rated video games, 

and I will explain to him the privilege 

of being white and male and how that 

doesn’t make him better than anyone else.

I will monitor his time online.

I will know who his friends are.

I won’t let him watch TV or 

movies where guns are present.

I will show him how to vent his anger

through needlepoint. 

Or drawing or writing poems. Picking dandelions 

until his soft palms yellow with pollen 

like a rabbit’s twitching mouth.

But this is all conjecture.

I will never have a son.

I know nothing about being 

a parent in a world designed for violence 

and manipulative, racist indoctrination 

of which none of us are wholly immune.

Least of all myself.

But if I did know everything, I would

do all of these things to save my son.

And it still might not be enough. 

Jared Povanda is a writer, poet, and freelance editor from upstate New York. His work has been published or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals including Wigleaf, The Citron Review, and Uncharted Magazine. You can find him online @JaredPovanda and in the Poets & Writers Directory. 

FINGERPRINTS

by Peter Witt

A mother in Black Creek, GA

drops her child off at school,

heads to the AR-15 assembly line

at Daniel Defense, where guns

coming off the assembly line

are packed by a father of three,

two in college, one still in high school.

A young woman, barely out

of high school processes online

orders for the killing machines

from gun stores across the U.S.,

trying not to think about if one

will end up in the hands of an 18

year old with murderous intent.

The owner of a Uvalde gun store

remembers legally selling the semi-

automatic weapon of mass destruction

to a young man who'd just turned 18,

then heading home for a birthday party

for his elementary school-aged niece.

A host of people, some with children,

have their fingerprints on the bullets

that made their way into the hands

of the Uvalde shooter, never realizing

they'd touched the bullets

that would shatter bones, blur faces

in a one-hour classroom rampage.

Somewhere in a peaceful office

a NRA publicist cranks out scripts

that pols and apologists can use

when the inevitable questions

about gun safety and control emerge,

he's yet to marry, have children,

doesn't think that children killed

in the sure to be future mass murders

could someday be his offspring.

In a conference room in Black Creek, GA,

the owner of the killing machine company

authorizes another 50K donation to the NRA,

a necessary cost of doing business,

profits from his company putting

his children through college.

Airforce One ferries the president and his wife

to yet another memorial gathering

where he will console parents whose

children never came home from school,

having only recently returned from

a similarly gathering of families

recovering from the hatred of a racist

who shot up a supermarket in their town.

At dinner tables around the country

families gather over traditional

Memorial Day hot dogs and hamburgers,

some with thoughts and prayers,

others to have discussions

about the need to own a gun,

protect their families, stave off

the murderous intent of someone

who purchased a gun made, shipped,

sold by fellow citizens, many with school

aged children—who firmly believe

the 2nd amendment is God's will

and plan to protect their children

from mayhem...

while somewhere in a bedroom

a young man, not yet 18, dreams of the day

he too can go the local gun store, purchase

an assault weapon made, shipped,

and sold by people with children,

so that he too can join the ranks

of the dead who've created

mayhem in a supposedly safe

classroom somewhere in the U.S.A.

Peter Witt lives in Texas, only a few hours away from Uvalde.  His work has appeared in The New Verse News, other online publications, and several print volumes.

THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS

by T R Poulson

I wish all emergencies could take place like this:

a theater in the city, stage guns made of rubber

and metal to withstand so many drops and hits

in rehearsals, forgotten lines and flubbers.

The line: I am not throwing away my shot,

as the killer creeps in—Lord show me how

to say no to this—that flutter, why not

here among the songs? The heartbeat now

slows, the patron falls, as Aaron Burr’s pistol

pops. Dying is easy, young man, living

is harder. It plays out as in a crystal

ball. Gun! No prayers, thoughts, forgiving

this time. If only hearts could always feast

on rhymes, as the attack of living lurks, looms,

the gunman a mere actor, a ghost deceased

long ago. I want to be in the room 

where it happens, where everything is just

musical, where lights give me an eyeful,

where words spoken, though fiction, I trust,

and paper walls surround non-shooting rifles.

T R Poulson lives in San Carlos, California.  Her work has appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News, as well as in Rattle’s Poets Respond, Verdad, J Journal, and others.  She enjoys basketball, windsurfing, and going to plays, including a recent performance of Hamilton in San Francisco, which took place the day before the performance in which there was a false shooter alarm.

SHE WHO IS IN BED AT NOON

by W. D. Bumsted-Hind

"Girl Asleep" by Martin Wells <@mwportraits>

She has been too near a shooter,
She has fled a forest fire,
She has become a president,
She has lost two classmates.
She is twenty.
She is both strong and weak,
Secure and insecure.
She is happy and sad.
Home in her old bed,
She is nestled up like a cocoon,
Asleep still at noon.
Trying to repair all that’s broken.
Don’t let yourself fall down,
Get up.
Be present,
Be alive.
Put on your war paint,
Iron your hair,
Sharpen your claws,
Fly free again.


W. D. Bumsted-Hind, JD/PhD, is Vice President for University Affairs at the University of Nebraska.  She has published poems in several journals including The Healing Muse and Blood and Thunder. Her poem "My Tattoos" was featured on New York Public Radio.

SUFFERING CHRISTA

by Devon Balwit

The artist Edwina Sandys with her sculpture “Christa,” the centerpiece of an exhibition [at New York's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine] of more than 50 contemporary works that interpret the symbolism associated with the image of Jesus. Credit Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times, October 4, 2016

Nowadays, it’s easy to imagine a suffering Christa—
the mothers of Aleppo, limp children at the breast,
Black mothers in America bent over sons in the road,
the mothers called to school in the wake of a shooter.

Who feels the world’s nails more keenly than the mother,
flesh pierced by the suffering of those she formed and suckled,
side oozing, rib cage unable to rise as her children lose breath?

She hangs between stars and rubble, arms outspread.
Lift her your sponge of vinegar.  Sit vigil.
You do not need to believe, only bear witness.
Better yet, shield the tender bodies of her young.


Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, OR.  Her poems have found many homes, for which she is grateful.  She welcomes contact from her readers.

THE FIGURE IN THE TOAST BURNT FOIL

by Alejandro Escudé





The shooter was hiding in the gleam
of a trashcan lid—he held the gun close
to his chest and sped from lid to lid
across international terminals.

They dropped their bags and ran
looking back for the coil of a black flag,
Arabic scroll, a figure in the toast burnt foil
as night broke among the neon columns.

The human mind is a spider slipping
off wet shower curtains, the heart,
a hundred hounds howling, the feet
like eighteen feet, the neck hacked
by Jihadi John in the military dawn.

No all clear on the horizon, more shots
heard from the coin-din of the airport
where the forest of propeller blades meet
the lost baggage mountains, a river rippling
where a tiger stalks the naked prisoner.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems, My Earthbound Eye, in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

NOT THE TIME

by David Chorlton

“This was slow and methodical,” [Bobby] Jindal said [of the Lafayette, LA movie theater shootings]. “It was barbaric.” The Republican governor, who is a candidate for the 2016 presidential nomination, was pressed on whether he should reconsider certain gun-control measures in the wake of the tragedy. He said now was “not the time” to discuss policy. —The Guardian, July 25th, 2015; file photo of Jindal at another time.

Remembering the shooter in a dark space
it all comes back in slow motion

but never slow enough
to be prevented. You might say

it was mysterious, the way the bullets
found random targets. All that remains

is to talk until no-one feels the pain,
as politics like poetry becomes

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:
it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.


David Chorlton grew up in England, in a time when Westerns were the favored theme in TV entertainment, never anticipating that he would one day live in Arizona, as he has since 1978. His poetry has appeared widely, and FutureCycle published his Selected Poems in 2014.

AFTER SANDY HOOK, NEWTOWN

by Joan Colby

Crews have torn down the home of the man who killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Mass. The school was demolished in November, 2013. AP photo via Time, March 25, 2015.

Nothing will bring them back.
The shooter killed himself as well
So the marble hand of justice
Cannot signal. There’s no one left to punish
Except the building where it took place.
Halls of learning. Books and desks
Stained with the memory of what happened.
Then the house where he planned the monstrous
Acts of unreason. Nothing left but to
Tear it all down. To burn the ground where they stood
And then maybe in time to plant
Something green and tend it.
It seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

I can’t help but be reminded
Of my friend accidentally kicked
By her horse and then lay comatose
For weeks on the narrow ledge of dying.
Her husband in his grief
Had the horse killed. What else could he do?
What could relieve this? Nothing. Nothing.
She woke to the empty stall of loss.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.