I DON’T GOT NOTHING. I DON’T GOT NOTHING

a collaborative poem 

by Amaré Fields and Ron Riekki

“I gotta run at eight.”  “So we got seventeen minutes to write this.”

“He gotta a gun and hate.”  “He’s seventeen years old bleeding to death.”

He was a kid. He could’ve been mine as me could have been yours.

We don’t have that kinda lingo in Seattle.  We have everywhere a battle.

With 9mm ruler sticks measuring out your lifespan.  Kadir Skinner,

19-years-old.  “We have a warning.  This video is difficult to watch.”

Have you seen Sinners?

Fourteen shots, 2 blocks ran. He was running.

How does someone defend themselves with their back turned?

Grey hoodie turned red with hate.  How does someone hear

Black words?  I’m not talking about the good cops.  We’re

talking about the bad cops.  We’re talking about black ops.

We’re talking about being hooded, dropped. “He was clearly

running away.” He has a gun he had a gun. The only gun

to his head pointed by the one with the blue

thread.  “I gotta run at eight.”  “So we got eleven minutes to write

this poem.” Cops protecting a land they not even

from. Drum bomb, Iran with a gun. 14 shots

10 blocks from the sun. You motherfucks

ain’t want this son. Honey bloody money

call for your mum.  We’re not talking about the Black cops,

we’re talking about the bad cops.  Bad cops

ain’t far from the good cops. 10 blocks

running from the blue opps.  Black bodies not far from

their homes.  Shot. Glock 19 MOS pistol

whipped car with lights too

bright. I can’t see.  Pissed writing this.  Resist.

I can’t see I can’t see. I. Can’t. See.

He was clearly running away.  Unarmed.

Unharmed?  Hell no.  Fuck the politicing

the hall of pity, shit ain’t witty.  Fuck the politicing

coming straight from the underground, a young brother

got it bad ‘cause he’s dead. Dead, honey. Dead,

you hear that. Dead.

You better start running now, motherfucker

We not talking about the Black cops,

the bad cops; shoot you down

front of your dad cops.

“Where’s your cousin?”

“He’s deceased.”

Body camera video of deadly police shooting released.

“I gotta run at eight.”  “We got three minutes to write this fucking poem.”

Ain’t bout the poem no more.

Words on a page

can’t hold this rage.

Please, don’t shoot.

I can’t see. Blood in my eyes

I can’t see.

I can’t sleep.

He can’t do anything except sleep.

If you held a microphone up to this brother

What would he say? 

Amaré, we got one more minute to write this poem:

what you got to say to the world?

Fuck the politicking this is real life.

Klu klux hold the world to a real knife.

Amaré Fields is a young Black and Japanese poet and scholar currently attending Yale University.

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

WHAT IS THE GUT TO A PUNCH?

by Malaika King Albrecht

The shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo occurred as immigration enforcement has ramped up across the country, with thousands being arrested daily. —The New York Times, July 10, 2026

          For Lorenzo Salgado Araujo (1974–2026), initially identified as John Doe.

 

A soft landing. We aren’t the first, scratching our matchsticks along a sidewalk, setting buildings on fire. We want to spark a future we all can breathe in. Family's not nothing, and we’re all relatives in an absolute kind of way, wearing our single-use bodies like prom dresses on our daily trips to the mailbox. The flickering space between birth and death is an unfolding dance of DNA and circumstance. Start the heart like a stopwatch. Let the ticking noise be background sound. Is it personal if it’s all of us? Here is the secret we tell one another in the closet of our dreams: you can’t sit this one out. We’re all John Doe as we pack lunch for work. This war is not a war but is a war if you resist. Behold our given names. Behold the milk poured over tear-gassed eyes. Behold how his speeches are tambourines full of bees.

Malaika King Albrecht's fifth book is forthcoming from Main Street Rag.

MASS SHOOTING #11

21740 W McNichols, Detroit, MI, April 19, 2026

 

 

"Suspect arrested after allegedly shooting 3 people at Detroit gas station. —MSN 

 

 

by Ron Riekki

 

 

 

 

 “beside some Shreveport-like expanse.
 But now you see it,”
—Bill Berkson
from “The Obvious Tradition”
 
“Haunted by ‘Dark Thoughts,’
Louisiana Father Kills 8 Children”

Literally this happens: I’m driving to a mass shooting
and on the way to the mass shooting I drive by
another mass shooting, recognizing the area, and,
 
at the same time, on the radio comes the news of
another mass shooting.  Welcome to America.
I think of the Childish Gambino video “This is
 
America,” the hyperviolence that’s so normative.
I think of the name Childish Gambino, Gambino
meaning ‘little gambler,’ like a child gambler,
 
a childish child gambler, and we’re in gang
territory, but all of Detroit is gang map on
the gang maps I’ve seen online, if those are
 
accurate.  And I think of the words ‘drive by’
at the start of this poem, the dual meaning,
and I’m exhausted, driving, and I’m tired
 
of these mass shootings, but I’m realizing
America is number one in mass shootings,
that America has perfected mass shootings,
 
that America equals mass shootings, that
other countries laugh at us for our mass
shootings, how we do nothing.  Jesus Christ,
 
I’m sick of it.  I’ve been going to every single
mass shooting in Michigan for the last ten
months and no changes are made.  None.
 
Nothing.  At the site of the mass shooting,
I talk with Pretty Eyes.  She wants to be
called Pretty Eyes.  Her name is accurate.
 
She tells me, “It’s something we got used to.”
She’s used to the shootings.  “You can’t
change people,” she says.  She adds that
 
“there’s no hope.”  I look around, this feel
of homelessness and hopelessness, this feel
of hole.  This massive feel that this isn’t
 
home.  I’m born and raised in Michigan.
Trash is speckled everywhere, the way
I’ve seen cooks on Top Chef sprinkle
 
salt so generously: white grocery bags,
paper cups, tissues, what looks like piled-
up abandoned old slabs of concrete curbs.
 
This is gang territory and, to be honest,
I feel perfectly safe.  This is a feeling
that’s grown, where I realize a sort of
 
ridiculousness that black men are some-
how inherently dangerous.  If anything,
they’re inherently courteous.  Rushed,
 
Bill tells me that he doesn’t have
time to talk, but says I won’t like his
answer to what needs to be done to
 
curb mass shootings.  “It’s strictly
God,” he says, “God and prayer.”
I like that it’s strictly God, reading
 
into how he’s worded it.  A woman
named T tells me, “It’s been like that
since I been here.”  She says, “You
 
get used to it,” echoing Pretty Eyes.
Nearby, the auto repair sign has
the word SHOCKS in caps and
 
that’s what this is, shock like lack
of blood flow to the tissues, shock
like feeling distress, shock like violent
 
collision, and, yes, that’s what led to
the mass shooting.  Bill tells me it was
“just road rage.”  Just road rage?  Says
 
it like it’s not a shock that road rage
would lead into a mass shooting.
Three killed.  Where we stand.
 
He has to go.  Pretty Eyes has to
get going.  T needs to run.  I stand
there at another gas station where
 
another mass shooting has happened.
I have no idea why, but constantly
these mass shootings are at gas
 
stations.  I think of the Strait of
Hormuz, the Exxon Valdez, Deep-
water Horizon, oil wars, petro-
 
aggression, petrostates, petrocracy,
a sort of arson of the world, and
a sort of prison of the world; we’re
 
at a Sunoco, listed online as an
“American vehicle gasoline master
limited partnership company”
 
started in 1886.  Master?  Why that
word?  Because it’s dead-on.
I talk with Bam.  He eats potato
 
chips, says the answer is “gun laws.”
He says, “mental issues cause
violence.”  He says, “You should
 
carry.”  He says he doesn’t have
a gun on him, but has one at home,
for protection.  He tells me about
 
his collapsed lung.  I asked if he
was shot.  “No.”  “Never.”  But
“I know a lot of people who’ve
 
been shot, by accident, or gang-
banging.”  He’s never been in
a gang, says people join gangs
 
because “they feel they got some-
body who loves them.”  Love.
I didn’t expect that word.  Love.
 
. . .
. . .
. . .
 
I drive away, heading home,
alone, passing a massive sign
above: $499 HEADSTONES.

 

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

ALMA MATER / SOUL MOTHER

by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto

a womb
a place we encourage our youth to strive to go 

to hope to go, 

to set their sites on,
Thayer Street where we promenade our thoughts, 
The SciLi where we fill ourselves with knowledge, 

thousands of hours reading reading everything we can get our hands on,
Soul Mother my heart aches for you
Soul Mother we send our young for your warm embrace,
Soul Mother we fail you, 
Youth we fail you,
Youth full of promise we fail you, 
Fail to protect you from the excesses of rage that is both a byproduct of our society, 
and rage that wells up from within, Rage that is armed.

Oh if it could only be a fair fight again, if only a raging man could have just fists and wits
Oh if only 

But that era is gone
And only one such as Gandhi could put out a meaningful call for all to lay down weapons,
and in the end, 
it was a bullet that got him too
a bullet kills a peacemaker

cursed bullets
cursed designers of bullets
cursed rage that had no better way to explode
cursed testosterone gunpowder rage
cursed whoever politicizes this killing of youth of brilliance of hard-working teenagers striving to carve of this world a better place 
Soul Mother, Alma Mater I ache for you

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto, class of 1986, Brown.

A NORMAL DAY IN MIDWEST AMERICA

by Michelle DeRose

A golden shovel after Frederick Joseph

 

 

The kind of news I can’t tell

Irish friends without shaking heads, asking me

how anyone sends children to school in America.

No laws in the aftermath, just lies about which

side the shooter’s on, new calls for the political will

for common sense but resignation that it

won’t happen. Here, one class of WMDs will be

free of all regulations, in homage to the

actual god who reigns above all—the gun.

To be free, great, and safe, we ask migrant or

homegrown? Stop at nothing to neutralize the

threat of brown parents who want care for their child.

Michelle DeRose is an embarrassed American who lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

LAST WORDS

by Shalmi Barman

He didn’t die cursing the tanks
or the turrets or swarming drones 
or the hillsides laid for ambush
or the cratered country road
harboring executioners.
 
I hear him through the static,
the shatter of windshield and bone,
chanting between gunshots
a prayer for the fleeing soul
            o god accept my repentance
            o mother forgive my choice
pleading against the darkness
with blood and breath and voice.
 
Let him be saved, if there’s saving,
while we damned in his stead
scream unresting curses 
to make the heavens deaf.

Shalmi Barman, originally from Calcutta, India, is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Virginia where she is writing a dissertation on class and labor in Victorian fiction. Her poetry has been featured in Gyroscope Review, Rat's Ass Review, Snakeskin, The Crank, and elsewhere.

HOW WILL I SAY I LOVE YOU

by Rachel Mallalieu

My son, a newly minted freshman, regales me

with tales of high school. There are pickleball

courts and the teachers are cool and the tacos

in the cafeteria aren’t that bad. Some of the varsity

basketball players already know his name.

He doesn’t think he will ask a girl

to Homecoming this year. There’s just one thing 

that’s bothering him. They take our phones

at the beginning of class. How will I say

I love you when someone shoots up the school?

Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency medicine physician and mother of five. As such, she deals with both the fallout and fears surrounding gun violence regularly.  Rachel is the author of A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022). Some of her recent poetry is featured in Superstition Review, Chestnut Review, Rattle and Whale Road Review. 

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT SCHOOL

by Peter Witt

At least four people were killed and multiple people injured after a shooting Wednesday at a Barrow County high school, near Atlanta, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced, adding that a suspect was in custody. Photo: Women embrace following the shooting. (Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)—The Washington Post, September 4, 2024

A fourteen year old killed two innocent children Wednesday,
along with two teachers, somebody's sons or daughters,
partners or parents, people who will be saddened,
no devasted, as the police call asking
a relative to come to the morgue, the death house,
to identify the body of a child or an adult who rose this morning,
dressed, said goodbye to their loved ones, forever,
and headed out the door to school, where they waited 
for a 14 year old with access to a gun to shoot them, 
dead, dead, dead. dead.

And the best we'll be able to do is thoughts and prayers,
as the gun lobby mounts another round of efforts
to suppress any reasonable action, as talking heads
are paraded across the TV screen with the same tired
rhetoric, while anti-reform legislators collect 1000s
of dollars to stand pat, do nothing 
again, and again, and again, and again.

Soon there will be funerals, with tearful parents,
loved ones, a community of people holding candles,
perhaps a politician speaking truth about killing machines 
in the hands of children, young people hugging each other, 
while hallways and classrooms are cleaned,
students and community members are offered counseling, 
so in a short period of time school can resume,
funds can be raised for a permanent memorial,
and the issue can disappear from the news
until the next young person gains access to a gun,
access to a school and puts out the light
again and again and again and again
in another group of young people
and dedicated teachers’ eyes.

Peter Witt is a Texas poet who is repulsed by the argument that people kill people not guns...it's obviously both...he has published his poetry in a wide-variety of outlets.  When he's not writing he's out birding and reinforcing his understanding of the human connection to the natural world. He and his wife also travel extensively, having just returned from Iceland/Greenland, where the witnessed first hand the impacts of climate change.

POWDER KEG

by Mark Danowsky

Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.
—  The Matrix
 

I wake with teeth clenched
 
I find myself holding my breath
 
We’ve pitted brother against brother
too long
 
In the end, it doesn’t even matter
who starts a war
 
They call it suicide by cop
when a gunman refuses to disarm
 
Sondheim reminds us
we lionize assassins
 
A conservative leader insists
The Left has choices
 
False prospect  
for a bloodless revolution
 
Shots fired

Mark Danowsky is Editor-in-Chief of ONE ART: a journal of poetry. He is the author of four poetry books. His latest poetry collection is Meatless (Plan B Press). Take Care is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in 2025.

SH*T

by Ron Riekki

Photograph by Angela Callanan

“Chicago shootings: At least 33 shot, 5 fatally, in weekend gun violence across city, police say.” 

—ABC7 Chicago, June 10, 2024

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –”

—Emily Dickinson

 

“Unbending the shape of the pew

from their backs and shuffling

the pooled blood”

—Neal Bowers, “Hymns”

 

I’m writing this fresh as it happened a few minutes ago,

a high-speed chase where the front vehicle almost hit mine,

turning off quickly into the apartment parking lot where I live,

although live isn’t the right word, the car tiny, like a Mitsubishi

Mirage, the back with metal mangled like tentacles, maybe hit

by a cop car, and there are about nine police vehicles directly

behind him—I assume it’s a him, the prisons are filled with hims—

and they Doppler by, police trucks in the rear, a couple unmarked

squad cars in back, almost all with lights on, but, strangely, no

 

sirens, as if they have all forgot about the sound, too caught up

in this road with its polluted beautiful trees all in a hypnotic

perfect fake line, and I stop there, craning my neck back to

watch cop car after cop car after cop car and then the stillness,

the clouds all leaking into each other so that it feels like one large

pool of cloud that keeps spilling out and two students walk two dogs

and one nips at the other and bark-whines and the silence again

until the gunshots start popping, scattered, quick, then done, gone,

and I park, get out.  This isn’t the first shooting I’ve heard lately.

 

The last one was a murder.  A sushi restaurant across the street.

They wanted the guy’s watch.  He didn’t give it to ‘em,

so they gave it to him.  That’s what a neighbor said.  The U.S.

has four of the most dangerous cities in the world.  The entire

world.  I live in one of them.  Although live doesn’t seem to be

the right word.  I asked today, before this happened, if I could

get out of my lease, the landlord sitting behind his desk the size

of a corpse.  He talked like he hated talking.  The Lord of the Land.

He said no.  He said I could buy it out.  On Generalized Anxiety

 

Disorder tests, they ask, Do you feel trapped?  I look out the window

right now, glance, typing this.  The trees are still.  There’s no wind.

There’s an ouch to the landscape, like you can feel the earth itself,

whispering to us, What are you doing?  We don’t know.  In the last

three days, there’ve been mass shootings in Wisconsin (10 shot),

D.C. (6 shot), Alabama and Nevada and Texas and Virginia (4 shot

at each); they only count a mass shooting if it’s “4+ victims injured or

killed,” so that the other 43 shootings where 2 to 3 were shot or

killed wouldn’t have to be counted, and then the eleven pages on

 

the Gun Violence Archive online that includes the one shot or killed,

so often, when I looked through the “View Incident” option, it lists

the victims as “Teen 12-17,” “rooftop party ranging in age from 14

to 23-yrs old were shot,” “Teen 12-17,” “Park Party” attendants,

“Teen 12-17,” “House Party” teens.  Teens, teens, teens.  Tens

of teens.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  Children.  The repetition.  I keep

writing about this.  History rhymes.  I swear to God, as I’m wrapping

up this poem, more gunshots.  Were those gunshots?  I ask a neighbor.

He doesn’t know, but he heard the cop cars.  He says he doesn’t know.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

SHE WAS NOT MY PATIENT

by Kelley White

Philadelphia toddler dies after shooting herself in the eye with father’s unsecured gun: police. —New York Post, April 8, 2024

But I don’t want to give her name
or the specifics of her case. I don’t want
to invade her family’s privacy. They have already
suffered more than I can imagine. Worse, I’m a grandmother, I can
imagine it. Have imagined it. Have seen other children 
shot. So many. Too many. I will not list their names or ages
only, imagine, this one shot by his brother over a video
game, this one shot by his friend during a game
of spin-the-bottle, this one ‘playing,’ this one
angry for a moment. This one whose grandmother
claimed the gun was safe. Oh, my dear ones
how much I imagine. I see your five year
old hands wrapped around the barrel.
I see the gun tossed casually on a
couch cushion, the gun left on top
of the refrigerator. The gun
on the dashboard of the
abandoned car. I hear
the shots, sometimes,
when I leave the clinic
for lunch. I see the 
crossing guard so
careful with her
charges at the
school just down
the road. I see
the children’s
faces. Their
hands on 
a trigger, 
my own 
old
empty 
hands. 

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in Philadelphia and New Hampshire. Poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) Recipient of 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant she is Poet in Residence at Drexel’s Medical School. Her newest collection, No. Hope Street, was recently published by Kelsay Books.