MASS SHOOTING #6

14201 2nd Ave, Gabrielle Apartments & Townhomes, Highland Park, MI, Sep 28 2025

by Ron Riekki

“the war speaks at night

with its lips of shredded children,”

—Tyehimba Jess,

“Mercy”

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I ask where he’s working.  He says, “Illegally.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

He says he can’t move his hand, he’s doing poorly.

Says, “We need more jobs.”  Leaves, says I’m too “cop-vibe”-y.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

Inside a car, a man crying.  Not quite payday.

Says it’s been a long day, his face all teary.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

2 adults, 2 teens shot on this property

2 days ago—foot, foot, shoulder, chest injury.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

 

I ask if he’s OK.  He says, “yeah,” politely.

He says the problem’s “gun stores.”  They’re making money.

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

 

White community’s answer is to “pray.”

I worry I can only think binary.

Black community says: fix “poverty.”

I worry I think the answer’s poetry.

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

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).

CONTEMPLATE THIS FOR A MOMENT

by Marc Swan

Mario Guti/Getty Images via Los Angeles Magazine

Through my window I watch the older woman
across the street hold her mask
as one of the teen bathing beauties
returns from the dock. She dons her mask

and asks of the crowd—
the mid-August high tide locals
who gather each afternoon for a swim,
a paddle board or kayak ride,

a mixed bag, mostly kids,
young adults, no masks
or social distancing—
immunity of the community expected.

I try to imagine what this older woman thinks,
taking medication,
immune system compromised,
just wanting a short walk to a safe place.

I think of school reopening,
many starting in outdoor tents,
seated on folding chairs

or in some cases hay bales. Masks
for the middle and high school kids,
teachers trying to educate in person
as government leaders, some parents expect—

inspire the children, give them a social outlet,
a safe place to go
while parents toil in the work space,
play tennis at the club,
go for long walks along the shore.

If the wind picks up or rain falls
in a torrential burst     what then?

And when the virus strikes hard and deep
where will the students be?

Marc Swan’s latest collection all it would take was published in May 2020 by tall-lighthouse. Poems forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Stony Thursday Book, Nerve Cowboy, among others. He lives in coastal Maine with his wife Dd, an artist and yoga teacher.

REPRIEVE

by Emily Jo Scalzo

months will bleed by
when gunshots don’t echo
down school hallways
in classrooms or lecture halls
a reprieve from hero-teenagers
called to sacrifice themselves
jump on the grenade
clot the flow of bullets
to buy seconds
for their classmates

red rivulets dammed
not due to prevention
or common sense
but because summer
darkens these venues
empty of fear for now
the halls lie waiting
for fall and more
blood shed

Emily Jo Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University-Fresno and is currently an assistant teaching professor teaching research and creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Midwestern Gothic, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Blue Collar Review, and others. Her first chapbook, The Politics of Division, was published in 2017 and awarded honorable mention in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards in 2018.

WHAT THE NEWS BRINGS: TOO MUCH, NOT ENOUGH

by Shirley Brewer

I




The sea calls, deep with freedom
and risk. A sparkling summer day,
a fishing adventure off the Florida coast
in their 19-foot boat. Born on the water,
the two teens learned to walk in water.
Are they heading toward a destination,
maybe the Bahamas, paradise,
an escape from the mundane? Nature
sings in open air, until the squalls.
When the boat capsizes, they become
lost boys. The ocean no longer a home;
it swallows them whole. Despite
days of searching, the sea rules.
The boat turns up, far away from the place
where they set out. The boys are missing.
Too much. Too much water.


II




A family of three from France
plans for a whole year to visit
the Wild West. A five-week journey.
Week One goes well. Then, New Mexico,
White Sands National Monument. They arrive
at noon, 100+ in the August desert.
What prompts them to set out
on the longest trail—4.6 miles, no shade—
with only two small bottles of water?
In the dreamer’s mind, a vision of adventure
doesn’t come with a temperature.
Mother heads back to the truck, feeling unwell.
She drops and dies. Father falls, stops breathing—
his tongue swollen. Their 9-year-old son will live.
Sands blow and shift: cruel beauty, brutal sun.
Not enough. Not enough water.


Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore, Maryland) is a poet, educator and workshop facilitator. In addition to TheNewVerse.News, her poems appear in Passager, Stone Canoe, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, Gargoyle, The Comstock Review, and other journals. Her poetry chapbooks include A Little Breast Music, 2008, Passager Books, and After Words, 2013, Apprentice House/Loyola University. 

LA MOTHER'S LAMENT

by JeanMarie VanDine

Ron Chapple/Getty Images

Another Saturday night
someone dies
in this welt of a town.
Black, brown.
Someone goes down.
Someone’s prized son
never reaches twenty-one.
Like the crow of the rooster,
the call comes before the sun rises.
Beacons glare in black puddles
on a balmy summer night.
Rage plays like an oldie,
under a skipping needle.
Brothers, like broken glass,
can’t mend themselves.
Mothers can’t restrain
their young,
pit bulls yanking
on choke chains.
Tears fall, fade
like chalk marks
on asphalt.


JeanMarie VanDine lives in Southern California, and has taught English in urban high schools—where she has witnessed the loss of many young men—due to violence.

MISPLACED

by Robert Farmer

Image by RachelO at somethingawful.com

Fighting a McDonald’s in Queens for the Right to Sit. And Sit. And Sit: For the past several months, a number of elderly Korean patrons and this McDonald’s they frequent have been battling over the benches inside. --NY Times, January 14, 2014


McFish sandwiches are always delayed,
demanding my observation of you old men
drinking endless coffee from paper cups,
polluting the place with the thick accents of age and origin.
You demean the décor in this room designed for delight
of children and of colorfully-haired teens
with trinket-pierced flesh.

We’ve designated appropriate places for you, don’t you know:
Try cheap diner counters
where you may communicate over watery soup,
or benches fronting backcountry stores
where you may contemplate red dust.
Maybe seedy city bars
with their atmosphere of long-spilt beer.
Perhaps even hospital corridors
where you sit with bewilderment across your faces.

But not here!
I will ignore you until my McFish arrives.
Then I will flee before your contamination.


Robert Farmer is 83 and lives in Cleveland where he sits around in Starbucks and the YMCA.