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.

POSEUR

by Devon Balwit

The New York Times

Today, I’m much struck by a phrase in the news

and try it out—“I demand your unconditional surrender!”—

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

Like magic, it aligns differing views.

(Backed by troops and gelignite, no wonder!) 

I’m much struck by this phrase from the news.

 

“Bring me tribute,” I add, “your children, booze!”

and suddenly, my house dazzles with gilt-y splendor.

My finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse,

 

my cup runneth over with oily ooze.

I down glass after glass, a drunk on a bender,

spurred on by this phrase I pulled from the news.

 

Outside, the sky purples to the shade of a bruise.

Let lesser men hide. I now live for thunder,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

 

As if on a pulpit staring down at the pews,

I fulminate, my creed’s best defender,

completely transformed by this phrase from the news,

my finger on the trigger, a lit match by the fuse.

When not making art, Devon Balwit walks in all weather and edits for Asimov Press, Asterisk Magazine, and Works in Progress.

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.

A LOADED GUN

by Ann E. Wallace

after Emily Dickinson

by C.B.

Had my life but stood 

a loaded gun, I might have 

roamed these sovereign states

with ease and in the open.

 

But though this woman’s body

may live longer than its lover,

or its foe, it receives no such 

constitutional protections.

 

We grant inalienable safeguards 

to our guns, as to the men who

cock and press the sacred trigger

with force and as they please.

 

If I were indeed that loaded gun, 

my liberty to choose, to carry 

or to abort, would be a right 

that is secured in perpetuity.

Ann E. Wallace is a poet and essayist from Jersey City, New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @annwlace409 or on Instagram @annwallace409.

THIS IS NOT A GUN

by Mary K O'Melveny

                        …El Paso (this time)


This is a video game gone quite wrong.
This is a prayer turned to a theme song.
This is a mental health problem.  A strong
response will allow us to move along.

This is a city where migrants have long
been welcome, in serape or sarong,
where border crossers shop for daylong
Walmart bargains—our US torch song.

They sell weapons there too that stoke real fears—
bumpstocks and bullets and bandoliers.
But apparently all is not as it appears,
even as these are checked out by cashiers.

The enabler-in-chief and all his peers
report that we must cover up our ears.
The silencing of rifles would set back years
of cold cash from NRA financiers.

Republicans, whose loyalty is owed
to makers of shiny things that explode,
hide from the press as the mark is towed
while innocents reap what their greed has sowed.

Where bones have shattered and blood has flowed,
these folks blather past each grim episode.
Their words are camouflaged in secret code
while still more angry white men lock and load.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses will be published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

YES, THEY SOW GUNS INTO THE BELLY OF THIS WORLD

by Ariana D. Den Bleyker





You cannot sow leaves back to a tree,
unpluck the plume of an eagle.
When words begin to rot the tongue,
those words cannot be swallowed back.

There is a dish to hold the sea,
a brassiere to hold the sun,
a compass for the galaxy,
a voice to wake the dead.

But this is the silence between us.
And this is why there will be no nest.
Because this is a relationship
between a bird & a gun.

Shots burst out into a crowd;
and, we saw the red-hot glint,
watching & crying & asking
that question over again.

Talons fall from the sky,
settle, & turn to rust. I hate you,
I think, as you shoot me
to death with a rifle in my face:

Born to pull the trigger.
Born to light the match.
Born to see the blood.
Born to steal the hope.

You feel rage & there are bodies
on the floor, me, dying,
almost dead, knees stuck
together with feathers & blood.

One gun to hold the bullets;
one finger to pull the trigger.
Truth wears everyday clothes.
Tufts crimson as sunset pass us by.


Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in New York’s Hudson Valley where she is a wife and mother of two. When she’s not writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of three collections, including Wayward Lines (RawArt Press, 2015), the chapbooks Forgetting Aesop (Bandini Books, 2011), Naked Animal (Flutter Press, 2012), My Father Had a Daughter (Alabaster Leaves Publishing, 2013), Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014), On Coming of Age and Stitches(Origami Poems Project, 2014), On This and That (Bitterzoet Press, 2015), Strangest Sea (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015), Unsent (Origami Poems Project, 2015), The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015), Knee Deep in Bone (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015), Birds Never Sing in Caves (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), Cutting Eyes from Ghosts (Blood Pudding Press, 2017), Scars are Memories Bleeding Through (Yavanika Press, 2018), A Bridge of You (Origami Poems Project, 2019), Even the Statue Weeps (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2019), and Confessions of a Mother Hovering in the Space Between Where Birds Collide with Windows (Ghost City Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of three crime novellas, a novelette, and an experimental memoir. She hopes you'll fall in love with her words.

LOW BEAMS IN THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA

by James Croteau

Along the Mississippi Delta. Image source: My American Odyssey

Only low beams lit the road

as my parents drove Highway 61

from Memphis through Clarksdale

to Cleveland with civil rights marches

all around us. I never knew

it's not a delta at all, no mouth

until further south. It's all alluvial

plain, this place of my birth. Grandpa

disembarked in Baltimore's harbor

in 1921, moved south when

cotton was still king but

he never planted. Instead he owned

a five and dime on Main Street

in Cleveland. I was proud

to help clerk. Sometimes he'd aim

squinted eyes my way, talk the Italian

he taught me “follow that N-word."

"It's the longest stretch of straight road

east of the Great River," my dad

always said as he drove, low beams

to avoid blinding the oncoming

drivers like us. We got used to not seeing

anything beyond the white

cotton by the side of the road.

Living legacies are often at the periphery

of the privileged. Even amid

outcries at the murders in the streets

and the churches, we whites miss

the lay of the land by

low beaming our questions--

Was the officer following policy?

Was the shooter mentally ill?

Isn't the KKK really to blame?

But I've been lucky, my eyes

have been pried apart by

a few good people. I see some

beyond the well-meant

intentions in front of my face.

The fertile flatness was freely

brought by the floods of the Yazoo

and Mississippi, then it was stolen

and exploited--Indian removal, slavery,

sharecropping, Jim Crow de jure

and de facto, this history's alive and

denied. If I high beam my heart

I can see that I could have been

Darren Wilson, even Dylann Roof.

I learn how the land of my birth

really lies, only when I can feel

the white of my finger placed

everyday on the trigger of the gun

I was given on the day I was born.

James M. Croteau lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his partner of 28 years, Darryl, and their two Labrador retrievers. Jim grew up gay and Catholic in the southern United States and loved his mother very much. He has had poems published in Hoot: a Postcard review of {mini} poetry and prose, The New Verse News, and Right Hand Pointing. He has a series of poems upcoming in April 2014 in Assaracus: A Journal of Gay Poetry.

TAUTOLOGY

by Judith Terzi

Mike de Adder

--with a nod to Bob Dylan

Ecstasy of the shot
Barbie doll for some  
Interchangeable parts
Three hundred million guns
Butter pecan      on your mark
Buy a shoe      a fishing hook  
A cap      a book of puns
How many deaths will it take?  
Will the wind be fresh?  
Buy a bike      Take a hike
Watch a lightning bug
Until the white dove
Has a good night's sleep
Most wanted arm
Stick of Juicy Fruit      sweet
Explosion on the tongue  
Remember when Trigger
Was a horse?      Gravedigger
Occupied     Lethal recourse
Not denied     Air-cooled fire  
Lock-bolt desire      Most wanted
Colt      Tautology assault

Judith Terzi is a Southern California poet and educator whose recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Raintown Review, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque). If You Spot Your Brother Floating By is her latest chapbook from Kattywompus Press.

TRAGEDY IN ELMO, MO

by Anne Harding Woodworth

ELMO, Mo. AP, January 20, 2015 • A 9-month-old northwestern Missouri boy is dead after his 5-year-old brother playing with a handgun accidentally shot him in the head. Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White says the baby was pronounced dead at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City just before noon on Monday. The Kansas City Star reports that emergency responders were called to a home in Elmo around 9 a.m. Monday after a 5-year-old found a loaded .22 caliber handgun and apparently was handling it when it fired. White says the bullet struck the 9-month-old, who was in a playpen. The sheriff says there is no reason to believe the shooting was anything other than an accident. 

There was every reason.

Stupidity.

The father was not there.
Absence.

The mother was in the kitchen.
Multi-task.

The baby was in the playpen.
Safety.

The five-year-old found the 22-caliber Magnum revolver.
Curiosity.

It was near a bed.
Paranoia.

It was loaded.
Paranoia.

He pulled the trigger.
Imitation.

The baby died inside his microcosm.
Innocence.

A gun killed a baby brother.
Insanity.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. She lives part-time in Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The rest of the time, she is in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

ANUBIS SPEAKS

by Anne Harding Woodworth




I will embalm the gun,
dip it in antimony salts and mercury
to preserve the image
of a life that is no more.
I will detach the grip and the trigger.
Both have fingerprints,
which cannot be erased
thoroughly, but I will try
before I reattach the parts to the body.
History must be able
to interpret the design
and the intention
centuries from now.
I will hook the bullet, pull it
through the barrel nose,
steep it in formaldehyde
and return it to its chamber.
History must be able
to decipher the bullet’s use
as the empowering heart
of a cherished anatomy.
I will wrap the gun in linen strips,
brush them with sweet resin
to conceal the stench of death.
And I will place tokens
within the wrappings,
a sword, a toy, a raven,
a rose, a razorblade.
This is my duty:
to prepare a thing for the journey
across the river,
where it will be judged
for its deeds on earth.


Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of four books of poetry and two chapbooks. Her work is widely published in literary journals and on line in the U.S. and abroad. She divides her time between the mountains of Western North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where she is a member of the poetry board at the Folger Shakespeare Library.