ODE: TO WITNESSING

by Margaret Gannon

Dedicated to poet journalist Ron Riekki who has covered all of Michigan’s mass shootings for The New Verse News since July 2025.

Each time the news repeats 

a scene of rampage, of chaos 

among folks who only yesterday 

went to the market 

for eggs or cigarettes. 

Each time the news zooms in on 

someone else’s pavement smeared 

with blood and worse; 

someone else’s daytime shattered,

nighttime exploded. 

Each time the news serves breakfast 

with jelly spread on toast and 

coffee spilled a bit on the table 

by the digital screen showing

a picture of a police car.

Each time, one by one, the news

forgets yesterday’s message 

and last week’s, twice, and doesn’t 

remember last month’s and then 

again, again.

Each time, the news reports

the reason, the explanation, 

the context that says 

human nature is the trigger.

If the news arrived with a face 

that had looked and looked 

at all the sameness of death — 

the vacant lot, the corner store, 

the porch, the schoolyard, 

the bar, the beauty shop,  

the man, the men, the boys, 

the singular girl, 

the shooters, the victims, 

their mothers, the neighbors 

all stunned in deadly experience —

each time asking why 

that despairing human being 

had a gun,

would the answer be like the kid 

to the cop in The Wire:

“Got to. This America, Man.”?

Margaret Gannon is an attorney retired from representing women in Bay Area courts for 50 years.

UNCOMBABLE

by Melissa Balmain

Locklan Samples, diagnosed with uncombable hair syndrome (UHS), a rare genetic disorder of the hair shaft.

Uncombable hair? Well, of course it’s a thing:

we’ve arrived in uncombable times

with uncombable dangers, umcombable ills,

and uncombable thought paradigms.

 

Nuts with guns are uncombable (so we’ve been told)—

we are doomed to uncombable grief.

Piles of nukes are uncombable; superbugs too,

and decay in the Barrier Reef.

 

Our hatreds? Uncombable. Ditto our loves

of red meat, SUVs, fossil fuel,

and the systems permitting too few of our kids

to be nourished and housed and in school.

 

Yes, it’s all so uncombable: that’s what we’ll hear

as we fall and the rising sea foams—

unless our uncombable powers that be

can agree on some new fucking combs.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America's longest-running journal of comic poetry. Her newest book of verse is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books). @MelissaBalmain

SERMON FOR SPRING HOLIDAYS

by Catherine Gonick

Source: Image from NewVoices.org via Haggadot.com. Adapted from Dinah Winnick.

In a just and regenerative world

cooperation and honor

a given

 

no one would be made a slave

but we are all traffickers

 

                  Gloria

and violence would be only

the absence of good

but we’re all mass shooters

 

                  In excelsis

our souls

are returned to us pure

aach morning

 

                  Deo

and we repollute them

 

beggared

imaginations can’t be trusted

with much freedom

children must be taught to share

although adults

can’t do it

 

in the nineteen hundreds

sperm whales learned

to swim upwind

of sailing ships’ harpoons

but now can’t escape our noise

 

alone on rising

stolen seas

our Jonah spat out

floats on plastic

 

in our hopeful house

chametz is hunted

a beast sacrificed

another Passover feast prepared

 

we pray       tikkun olam

for whomever shall inherit     our Earth

                                   

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Silver Birch Press, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and Dead of Winter. She works in a company that seeks to slow the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate.