THE MALL THIS TIME

by Anna Evans

Allen Premium Outlets, Texas, May 6, 2023

He strolls the mall as if he owns the place,
his open carry rifle in plain sight
but there is something missing from his face,
 
the eyes a little wild, the grin off-base.
In matte black body armor strapped on tight,
he strolls the mall as if he owns the place,
 
as if it is a job, a joint to case,
as if it is a calling—no, a right—
but there is something missing from his face.
 
He starts to shoot. It seems like time and space
stand petrified, before the bullets bite.
He strafes the mall as if he owns the place
 
till death by cop with no crossfire, no chase,
his body dropping in blood sticky bright,
that ugly smile at least wiped off his face.
 
And spokesmen’s thoughts and prayers clang through the night.
Guns don’t kill people, they insist, despite
the broken bodies scattered every place,
the murdered young girl with a missing face.

Anna M. Evans gained her MFA from Bennington College and has received Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her collection Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic is available from Able Muse Press, and her sonnet collection Sisters & Courtesans is available from White Violet Press.

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE U S OF A

by deb y felio

The former guy "is scheduled to speak at the National Rifle Association's Annual Leadership Forum on Friday. But audience members at the group's annual meeting, being held this year in Houston, won't be able to carry guns during his address. The conference is going ahead in the shadow of Tuesday's mass shooting at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school that killed at least 21 people—including 19 students." —NPR, May 25, 2022

Let us now raise our voices

for the freedom we have to make our choices

of who lives who dies 

and not on the battlefields where all are armed

but at schools and churches newly charmed

with flowers and toys, memorialized.

Let us now send out our thoughts and prayers

and pay no notice to the real players

who love to make a stand

not against the gun lobbyists

or restrictions for purchases

those real actions would be too grand.

So Texas before you can bury the children

the NRA you will be welcoming

and after all it isn’t guns that kill.

But if that eighteen year old had entered

that school today and stuck out his finger

would so many lives have been stilled?

deb y felio is a poet writing as witness to the mundane and miraculous and the under-represented sides of historic and current issues while working as a family and child therapist in Colorado. Published credits include anthologies Hay(na)ku 15; Gabriel’s Horn: Startled by Nature (2020); Refuse to Stay Silent (2020). Her cherita sequence was a finalist in MacQueens’s Quarterly March 2021 ekphrastic challenge.

WHEN I DIE IN THE NEXT MASS SHOOTING, HERE'S WHAT I LOOK FORWARD TO

by William McCarthy

"American Exceptionalism" by Nick Anderson.

“We never thought it would happen here,” my neighbor Sheila says.

Flags fly at half-staff; the governor holds me in his thoughts and prayers.

Another surge in the sale of assault weapons.

My senator reiterates that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

 

My senator holds me in his thoughts and prayers.

More dollars promised to help the mentally ill.

Flags fly at half-staff; my governor reiterates that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Congress proposes another bill, weakens it, lets it die in committee.

 

Even more dollars promised to help the mentally ill.

On the six o’clock news, my children leave the church with my coffin.

Congress proposes another bill, weakens it, lets it die in committee.

The surgeons release my wife from the ICU.

 

On the six o’clock news, my children leave the church with my coffin.

Newspapers savor the irony: I survived a mass shooting a month ago, only to die in this one.

The surgeons release my wife from the ICU.

My thirteen-year-old daughter tells Anderson Cooper how much she will miss me.

 

Newspapers savor the irony: I survived a mass shooting a month ago, only to die in this one.

Another surge in the sale of assault weapons.

My governor’s wife holds my two-month-old son in her arms.

“We never thought it would happen here.”

Thirty years ago William McCarthy joined the Connecticut Writing Project and hasn’t recovered yet. “Since then," he writes, "I've tendered my drafts almost monthly in a writing group of other recovering CWP teachers. There’s a closeness among us we get nowhere else, as we share bits and pieces of our lives—our trials with truculent pianos, unpredictable children, and failing parents. Part is honing our craft, part is shaping our experiences, part is understanding who we are.”

NARRATIVE

by Colm Ó Ciarnáin

Artwork: Indie

Gibberish       weponised    nonsensity

Obnoxification of society
ratification of cagedness
realization of stupidity
recognition of affirmation bias
nausea at repugnance
aversion to its abhorrence
revulsion at the antagonism
animositic reluctance to truth

                          and traveling abroad we find exciting
                          and It can be life changing enjoying that freedom

and traveling abroad we find exciting
                          and It can be life changing enjoying that freedom

speak fluent moran
crisp without even a sludder
then lean into the suck
as there is a virtue in
broadcasting your amorality at
the highest known volumes of stupidity
trust busting reality of lies

                          and we enjoy new languages
                          and they give us hope
                                                 
                          and we enjoy new languages
                          and they give us hope

untethered to truth
thoughts prayers and cynical gestures in
pioneering of nauseating evention, testifony, fasadism
mythic past warped by
liberal             feminist          or                      immigrant
conjured truths against faith and adjacent reality
decorum trumped constantly by derision
bannonesque divisions

                          and my friends are with me
                          and it's going to be a good day

 and my friends are with me
                          and it's going to be a good day

fetischouce twitter fingers
trust busting realities of lies
I believe him Truth isn't truth but When I can, I tell the truth—
He means it
making hate again
with truths that burned witches
make fake again by self-proclamations testifications
down the slinker hole
otherings untethered to truth

                          and we shall have fun
                          and the future is bright
                                                                           
                          and we shall have fun
                          and the future is bright

Colm Ó Ciarnáin is a cultural worker originally from Ireland but now living in Sweden. He likes to use his emotions to paint pictures with words. He realised early in life that no matter how much he talked around a subject, words didn’t have the power to convey his feelings, being hampered by logical structures. He finds though that words when used in poetry for him paint between the lines. Flowing beyond the confines of realism and logic to bare self. A nudity of the soul inconceivable except in the hope of a poem. His poetry defines his inner self.

CONDOLENCES ON THE PASSING OF YOUR CONFEDERATE MONUMENT

by MEH

Sunday night at Linn Park in downtown Birmingham, Alabama, a crowd took down the city of Birmingham's Confederate monument. Photo tweeted by Daniel Uhlfelder.

our deepest thoughts and prayers are with you
for the terrible loss you must be feeling. but
what was it doing in that part of town, so far away
from its own kind? didn’t it know, wasn’t it raised
better? (poor thing probably had a father in prison,
a mother on welfare, like so many of your people).
honestly though, it should have just followed the law,
not been out there on the street corner, glorifying thugs
of a bygone era (with all their violent music and chanting).
it’s un-American. it should have known its place,
known when to keep its mouth shut. but it wouldn’t stop
resisting. and I heard it had a weapon. it only got
what was coming to it. they had no choice, were only
doing their jobs. we should consider how they feel:
all lives matter. but it is a tragedy—no community
should watch a thing crushed to death like that while
children looked on. but the sad truth is it was well
past its prime and had an underlying health condition.

MEH is Matthew E. Henry, a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet. The author of Teaching While Black (Main Street Rag, 2020), his recent works are appearing or forthcoming in Baltimore Review, Bryant Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, Poemeleon, The Radical Teacher, Rejection Lit, The Revolution (Relaunch), Solstice, and Spiritus. MEH is an educator who received his MFA from Seattle Pacific University, yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education.

A BULLET CONFESSES

by Sarah E. Colona

The 12 victims of the Virginia Beach mass shooting: LaQuita C. Brown, Ryan Keith Cox, Tara Welch Gallagher, Mary Louise Gayle, Alexander Mikhail Gusev, Joshua O. Hardy, Michelle "Missy" Langer, Richard H. Nettleton, Katherine A. Nixon, Christopher Kelly Rapp, Herbert "Bert" Snelling, Robert "Bobby" Williams

unwelcome as a thunderclap
no storm in the forecast
or that’s the printed headline

wherever humans gather
where hands stretch Velcro or loop shoelaces
classroom, church, amusement park

instill mastery of the tourniquet
combat American love
of gun metaphor and euphemism

do not soften my path to water: shower, spray
trauma shreds flesh
blood loss floods a morgue

my name began as small ball
now watch me reduce
one nation to thoughts and prayers

Sarah E. Colona is the author of three poetry collections: Hibernaculum (Gold Wake Press, 2013), Thimbles (dancing girl press, 2012) and That Sister (dancing girl press, 2016).

WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN WASHED AWAY

by Dustin Michael

The devastating tsunamis that struck the coastlines of Chile, Haiti, Indonesia, and Japan in recent decades produced waves tens of meters high, unimaginable to most people accustomed to gentle seas. But millions of years ago, a truly inconceivable set of waves—the tallest roughly 1,500 meters high—rammed through the Gulf of Mexico and spread throughout the ancient ocean, producing wave heights of several meters in distant waters, new simulations show. (Photo credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo) —EOS, December 20, 2018

If there had been an Eiffel Tower,
an Empire State Building, a Great Pyramid,
One World Trade Center, a Statue of Liberty,
our house, our cars, and all the plates and dishes
from our wedding registry, our books, our children,
our children’s new dinosaur toys and my old dinosaur toys,
if there had been these things all stacked one on top of the other
like a mighty finger, they would point up to space, and to the terrible foam
of a still-much-taller wave.

If there had been human words to fail,
a rich tapestry of languages, a monomyth,
creation stories from every culture, all involving fire
and water, the name Enkidu in Sanskrit on a shard of pottery,
a diagram of the heroic cycle labeled fig. 2 in a student’s essay
about the earth-diver, the bones of Joseph Campbell
tumbling over and over in a tsunami that scrapes clean
all the bone beds, petroglyphs, an animated film on VHS about 
non-contemporaneous dinosaur friends on a dangerous journey,
drawer after drawer full of carefully labeled fossils all scattered,
all hit with the hose

If there had been a firebox containing the important papers,
passports, proof of citizenship, baptism certificates, bonds,
our homeowner’s insurance policy locating us in a flood zone,
topographical charts predicting sea level rise that the current administration
commissioned and then dismissed, the food and gas receipts from hurricane evacuations never submitted for a claim, fluttering away into a darkening sky like a thousand tiny lab coats

If there were a way to imagine a bullet from space
striking a planet of enormous birds, or to invent an instrument 
to measure emotions from plaster footprints made from casts of stone,
if there were a way to carbon date an animal’s scream and filter it
through a mile-high wave crossing the globe at close to the speed of sound,
or to photograph the world dying from our bedroom, I would reclaim these secrets from the quivering Earth for you and fall asleep with dirt from the backyard grave of our parakeet under my nails, tracing my finger along the crater
in your pillow where your face has pressed,
and discover a new layer of sediment there
composed entirely of thoughts
and prayers


Dustin Michael teaches writing and literature. He lives with his wife and children in Savannah, Georgia.

THIS TIME

by Heather Newman

A police officer directed a bystander off the crime scene on the Boston Common. JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE, September 12, 2017

1.

On a mid-September afternoon
in historic Boston Common
multiple gunshots were fired
near the bandstand, among bystanders, a brazen act,
police called it, locals say this never happens in Boston,
                                    it’s a college town.
A nineteen-year-old Hyde Park man
was critically injured. The shooting triggered
chaos in one of the nation’s oldest parks.
Police chased a man into a trolley tunnel at Arlington station,
a gun was recovered, three are in custody.              
Police believe it was not a random act.
But this is not a poem about terrorists or home growns
or viable solutions for
public safety.
Authorities say an argument preceded the shooting,
all people involved in the incident are known to police
                                    and it’s unclear if it’s drug or gang related.
This is a poem
about those who dodge a bullet and
those who are not dead, yet


2.

She calls me crying, barely able to speak, and I fear the worst.
Twenty minutes before, we had been chatting. She was
                                    on a mission to discover
a farmers market. She loves her classes, her roommate.
I’m thrilled; this wasn’t her first choice of schools.
Please, God, don’t let it be rape.
She tells me she ran from gunfire but she’s safe, back in her dorm.
I’m relieved. School is in lockdown.            
On the internet. Looks like they caught the shooter.
She says she thought about playing dead instead of running.
We had discussed this right after Sandy Hook.
                                    I’m in New York City and I’ve never run from gunfire.
Twitter says two of the three suspects fled on mopeds.
Impossible, she says. Those guys on the red vespas were not the shooters.
Are you sure you want to get involved?
She spent hours at police headquarters, couldn’t sleep for days.
I flew her home for the weekend, took her shopping.
                                    Statistics say this shouldn’t happen to her again.


3.

“When you hear ‘active shooter,’ you run . . .”
this epidemic, these pleas, how many die before
                                    another one
“It sounded like fireworks . . .”
flags lowered, legislation, time for congress to enact
                                    another one
NRA, massacres, stranglers, bombers, revolutions
prove we can’t stop
another one  
“These are happening too much, these shootings,”
thoughts and prayers, in God we trust
                                    another one


4.

But back to the Common.
This story won’t be found on CNN or Fox News,
The New York Times or The Washington Post.
It was just another boy
not enrolled in a college, somewhere in critical condition.
And three unnamed others, who knew each other and were known to police;

                                    they were released the next day.

Heather Newman is an MFA candidate at The New School (NYC.) Her work has appeared in Voices from Here, Vol. II, TheNewVerse.News, The Potomac, Two Hawks Quarterly, Aji Magazine, Matter, Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop and eChook.