MASS SHOOTING #12

300 block of West Biddle Street, Jackson, MI, May 9, 2026

“Jackson Police investigate afternoon shooting that injured 4 locals.” —Mlive

by Ron Riekki

“watched his childhood;

Amid strange faces and strange forms.”

—Mary Torrans Lathrap,

“The Wanderer's Grave”

“We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.”

—MacReady (played by Kurt Russell)

in The Thing (1982)

 

“freedom which is a crater

I keep falling in.”

—Major Jackson,

“On Disappearing”

            i: Prologue

 

Between Fourth of July 2025 and Memorial Day 2026,

there have 837 separate shooting incidents in Michigan,

In 325 days, there have been 15 mass shootings here,

about one mass shooting every 22 days.  I started going

 

to mass shootings on July 4 last year.  On my birthday,

mid-May, we reached 1,000 people shot in Michigan in

just 11 months.  Currently, 1,042 people have been shot.

I have only one more month to go.  I can’t do it anymore.

 

 

            ii: Dialogue

 

On the way to Jackson, I pass a park, and a bail bonds office.

This is my first mass shooting I’ve gone to where the mass

shooter is a female, her bond set at a quarter of a million

dollars.  A May 9 headline reads “Attempted murder charges

 

against shooting suspect dropped shortly after her arraignment.”

The victims: a 21-year-old male shot twice in the chest and

once in the arm, 28-year-old male shot in the face and arm,

25-year-old female shot in the pelvis, and 23-year-old female

 

shot in the arm.  This doesn’t feel like a poem.  I don’t feel

like writing a poem.  I don’t feel sometimes driving to these

mass shootings.  The repetition.  The petitions that do nothing.

Worse.  It seems to be spreading to all of us.  A virus.  I feel

 

disgusted.  I discuss this with a woman who lives less than

a block from the shooting.  I’m talking to a female about

a female mass shooter who just shot two females in the arm

and, of all places, the pelvis.  The symbolism.  The city bright

 

green today.  I talk to her at the foot of her garden and

there are two men nearby.  Anna and Dan and an unnamed

man who reminds me of Seasick Steve (the musician whose

name I thought was Steve Gone Wild, but is actually Steve

 

Gene Wold, half-guitarist-wizard half-pirate); his doppel-

gänger floats in and out of the discussion of danger and

anger and it’s very city focused, talk of Romulus, Detroit,

Jackson.  And the three of them seem like they’d fit in with

 

the entourage of Action Bronson (of F*ck, That's Delicious

fame).  They tell me Jackson needs more community gardens.

On the way here, I passed a bike park, another park, a b-ball

court, and then the abandoned park near their home with its

 

rusty swings and weeds and graffitied slide and need of

upkeep and another basketball court, but this with no nets.

They tell me it’s the youth, that we didn’t do mass shootings

when we were young, tells me he handled a gun at age 8,

 

has a gun now, says “the problem is the access.”  Or is it

the excess?  Its infinity.  ∞.  I ask this.  He says they need gun safety.

I ask how gun safety is going to help a mass shooter.  It seems

gun safety is an oxymoron.  We talk more on how “it’s a vicious

 

cycle,” and when change is attempted “they get roadblocked

by the government.”  Anna says the problem is the chronic

violence of TV, video games, music, movies.  We’re not far

from Mount Evergreen Cemetery.  I don’t know about

 

the mount, but there’s green everywhere today.  I feel jaded.

It feels I’ve had this discussion before.  Gun owners telling me

there’s too much access to guns.  ?  They’re nice.  They’re open.

They’re enjoying the summer day.  One heard the gunshots.

 

One didn’t.  They tell me those who were shot know who did it,

but they don’t want to speak.  News says people are afraid

to talk, worried about getting protection.  There’s apparently

40 unsolved murders in Jackson.  We chitchat.  Wide open.

 

I worry America is guns.  Guns won.  Hell, it’s confusing.

It is Hell.  Kamala Harris, a Democrat, brags about owning

a Glock.  The Republican President can’t own a gun

due to his felony conviction.  They talk about how you’re

 

safe if you keep your nose clean, if you “stay away from

trouble,” from “people congregating.”  Perhaps we’re saying

you can prevent mass shootings by simply staying away

from people.  The myth that COVID reduced mass shootings.

 

We trade one virus for another.  I’m tired.  We don’t have any

solutions.  Or maybe we have too many solutions.  There’s no

silver bullet.  The conversations are triggering.  You try to offer

up solutions but get shot down.  We need to set our sites on

 

something better.  The language is gun-drowned.  Steve

tells me I need to go, that the dog wants to come out—

Zeus, their German Shephard.  He tells me the dog’s hairs

are standing on end, that he wants to come after me, that

 

it’s best to leave.  As I’m walking away, he shouts to my

backside, “If he doesn’t know you, he’s very aggressive!”

 

 

            iii: Epilogue

 

The realization, driving home, is that this wasn’t the only

mass shooting in Michigan on May 9, another in Muskegon.

 

And, on May 9, more mass shootings in Reddick, Florida,

and in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  We’re perfecting mass

shootings.  We’re teaching the normalization of mass

shootings.  Gun purchases increase after mass shootings.

 

The beauty is the ugliness.  Gun violence and capitalism

F*ck each other.  But there’s this strange revelation that it’s

the gun owners who get killed.  It’s gun owners who have

increased suicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

 

increased homicides in their homes.  It’s gun owners who have

increased accidental shootings in their homes.  Safety comes from

actual safety.  It’s a horror film.  “Don’t go in!”  Guns are the thing.

And guns are The Thing.  It.  And It.  “The horror, the horror.”

 

 

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

MESSENGER RNA

by Claudia Gary

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.

Vaccine doing its work

sent signals overriding

emotion, music, words,

hunger, desire—but only for

one day, that messenger.

Soon there would be sunset 

with orange hues to mark

the hours that made up

a day of gratitude—

vaccine, then first-day voting—

two gifts! Will I recall

such joy? And will the volume

of voting be sufficient

to stop that other virus?

Claudia Gary teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online.

NEW ORLEANS MARDI GRAS

WEIRD WORLD OF JOY AND PAIN

by Mostofa Sarwar

AI-generated graphic for The New Verse News by Shutterstock

I rode the Captain’s Float in Endymion

I saw the frolicking crowd

I enjoyed the rainbow of merriment

undulating its mesmerizing wings,

sprinkling its magical potions

over the revelers

The scintillating curves of human flesh

under the thin veneer of fabrics

The vile sound of the Second Amendment

flashing snippets of life

The dead crawling the crowded streets

I saw the specter of Paul Verlaine

over Saint Charles Avenue

He was catching beads

Was he happy?

He was wearing an MP3 player

Was he listening to Debussy’s incarnation

of his ‘Claire du Lune’?

Or was eternal pain eating his flesh

Like a deadly virus

I saw

Under the veil of merriment

New Orleans, like Bergamo,

hiding

the suffering, 

and poverty, violence, injustice

Let me have a jug of absinthe

And forget this weird world of pain and joy

 

Dr. Mostofa Sarwar is professor emeritus and former associate provost at the University of New Orleans, dean and ex-vice-chancellor and provost of Delgado Community College. His opinion essays were published in The Daily Star and Bdnews24.com of Bangladesh, The Strait Times of Singapore, The Statesman of India, Phuket News of Thailand, The Times Picayune of New Orleans, The Advocate of Baton Rouge, The Acadiana Advocate of Lafayette, The Daily Advent and The Opera News of New York. Recently, his English poems were published in Sangam Literary Magazine and The Seattle Star Magazine. Sarwar published three books of Bengali poems. He frequently appears in Bengali talk shows at cable TV channels (broadcast out of New York, Washington, DC, and Dhaka).

NEXT WEEK—DEO VOLANTE

by Joan Leotta

I’m supposed to drive to Raleigh,

2.5 hours from here and stay 

in a hotel alongside a creek

that sometimes floods

(as does the creek behind my house), 

to immerse myself in 

a sea of poety.

 

All of these plans could 

be swept away by the winds

and water of the pending hurricane.

 

So, why do I still plan?

Life had  taught me

all can change sooner than

the weatherman predicts,

sooner than my doctor thinks.

In an instant, crossing the street,

or stumbling on a sidewalk crack,

a new virus,

waiting at a bus stop

shopping in my favorite grocery

Someone’s car, my clumsiness,

germs, someone’s gun fueled anger,

all of these can take me

to the “other side.”

I know because my son

was hit by a car on a night 

he had plans,

so as I plan, I add, God Willing,
Deo Volante, to my notes,

knowing all could end now

but not worrying because once I step

to that other side, there will 

be loved ones who await me there.

Joan Leotta. Author, Story Performer

AUGUST

by Juditha Dowd

This evening it occurs to me I ought to call my mom and dad
because it’s been a while. And for a moment they are not
gone some fifteen and thirty-six years, but still at the house 
where I left them, the first of their children to depart.
It’s summer and steamy and all the windows are open wide.
She’s on the porch working the Sunday crossword.
He’s out back picking tomatoes or wielding some tool—
lawnmower, drill, or paint brush. For what they may lack 
in talents or skill they substitute perseverance.  
Today I took tomatoes from the garden we extended again
in this post-pandemic summer, the leaves already mottled 
with a virus that will kill the plant but doesn’t harm us. 
Here too it’s hot and humid, like that year my twin brothers 
caught polio, from swimming at a public pool some said.
The same August our younger brother almost drowned 
in the deep end and our country joined the Korean war,
though my father was too old to fight in that one. 
If only my phone could find them tonight, I’d assure them 
I’ll get another booster. Or bemoan the endless shootings,
the forest fires, the latest wars… Or instead I might say 
It’s 100° and I’m making a tomato sandwich. 
Maybe leave it at that. They’d know what I mean.
 
 
Juditha Dowd’s fifth book of poetry, Audubon’s Sparrow, is a lyric biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon (Rose Metal Press). She was a 2022 finalist for the Adrienne Rich Award and has contributed poems to Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.

THE NEW PANDEMIC

by Ralph Dranow

poster available at amazon

A new pandemic is sweeping the world.

Scientists speculate it started last month

with a six-year-old girl in Indonesia,

a precocious child,

who transmitted it to her parents,

who passed it on to others.

Now it's spreading throughout the country

and other places as well.

The virus surges through the bloodstream,

infiltrating the heart and third eye,

causing people to love one another.

Politicians, CEOs of corporations, and Republicans

are furiously working to contain the virus,

claiming it's bad for business,

suggesting people wear masks and social distance.

But it might be too late.

The virus is very powerful,

seeping through even the strongest mask,

dancing through the bloodstream,

like an ecstatic child.

Ralph Dranow works as an editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. His poems and articles have been widely published.

NUCLEAR WASTE

by Charles Rammelkamp

Ukraine has initiated a defensive strategy for the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most radioactive places on Earth, which lies on the shortest path between Russia and Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Photo: A Ukrainian border guard on a joint patrol with the Ukrainian police inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. —The New York Times, January 22, 2022

“It doesn’t matter if it’s contaminated,

or if nobody lives here,” Yuri declared,

responding to the unspoken skepticism 

in the sheen of the reporter’s dark eyes.

“It’s our territory, our country,

and we have to defend it.”

Shouldering his Kalashnikov, Yuri patrolled 

the snowy fields of the Chernobyl zone;

winter in northern Ukraine.

“I remember reading about the Soviets

parading the children on May Day 

through the swirl of radioactive dust

right after the accident 

to try to make us—and the world—believe 

nothing serious had happened.

Thank goodness I wasn’t alive then.

“Pripyat’s a ghost town now;

used to be the biggest city in the area.

You can still see the old Soviet propaganda –

a sign extolling the virtues of nuclear energy.

‘Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier.’”

Hunching his shoulders, as if to toss away his anger,

shifting the rifle, Yuri went on:

“Now we don’t know 

what will kill us first,

the virus, radiation, or Putin’s bombs.”

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife Abby. He contributes a monthly book review to North of Oxford and is a frequent reviewer for The Lake, London Grip, Misfit Magazine, and The Compulsive Reader. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, was published in 2021 by Clare Songbirds Publishing and another, Sparring Partners, by Moonstone Press. A full-length collection, The Field of Happiness, will be published in 2022 by Kelsay Books.