Dear Reader,
There's a place online called the Gun Violence Archive. Over the past month I've had special cause to spend time there, where American gun violence is tracked and catalogued. After all, I'm in the business of editing poetry about current events. Lately that's meant I'm in the business of editing poetry about guns.
There are two statistics from the GVA that stand out to me most. Neither of them have to do with mass shootings. This year, there have been 1,786 unintentional shootings and 1,759 defensive uses. Nearly the same. Gun owners have reached an equilibrium in which you're just as likely to shoot someone you seek to protect as you are to shoot someone you need protecting from.
To me, this balance seems just as important as the three-hundred eighty-two mass shootings that have occurred this year, or the six hundred fifty children shot or injured this year, or the cumulative fifty four thousand sixty one gun incidents this year. All of these shootings occurred before the first autumn rains slicked the roads here in Oakland. A city where shootings are so constant that they are no longer front, second, or even third page news.
Is it true, that we need guns to survive in America? It's true there are lessons in numbers we don't care to learn. It feels like the only people that can change the gun laws are the people that insist guns are the most important thing an American can own. It feels like they - the guns - are everywhere.
After all, the massacre at Sutherland Springs would have certainly been worse without more guns - where a hero with a rifle took aim at a mass shooter. (Trump's declaration of "hundreds more saved" at Sutherland remains ecstatic embroidery). Gun rights activists like to talk about the power of defense weapons to ward off intruders, attackers, people that don't belong. This week, that violent fantasy went full-circle.
Atticus Finch told Jem that having a gun around is an invitation for somebody to shoot you. I wonder why nobody listened to that. But then a different voice jumps in, the one that read these numbers. A gun's no excuse but a gun is why.
Sincerely,
Elle Aviv Newton,
Editor-In-Chief ,
Poets Reading the News
Even Here
By Paul Bone
The rifle the truck the church the pew
the pastor the hymn the prayer
The tenor and alto soprano and bass
the dresses the cloth to bear
The savior and grace the wounds the blood
the bones the boards the splinters
The major chords yet the minor key
through which the bullet enters
The altar call the empty shells
the sheep on his good right hand
the least of these the not yet born
the haircuts the wedding bands
The thoughts the prayers the shrug the wish
the Lord and his setting sun
The bigger graves and the smaller ones
the guns the guns the guns
Shadow of a Prayer
By Matthew Murrey
Thoughts and prayers are going
to do about as much good
as t-shirts or windbreakers would,
but a bowed head seems fitting—
I could do that. A raised hand
casting a silhouette on old siding
reminds me that—no matter
how solid I seem—light
shows us to be nothing
but shadows waiting to happen.
My turn’s coming. I used to think
my chances for a peaceful end
were pretty good, that I’d go
like one of the old ones—in bed
mumbling and delirious in the room
where we slept for forty years,
or with family standing over me
as I let go of my last breath
in the same hospital where
I saw my son come into this world.
I can hope, but I’m guessing
the end won’t draw such a circle.
Floods, fires, soldiers, famine,
bombers and cold-blooded men
with long guns and backpacks
stalk my nightmares. Prayers?
Go ahead; I won’t mock you,
even if your first words are
“Dear Heavenly Father” or
you finish “in Jesus’ name.”
What do I got that’s better—
my bitter thoughts, heavy
and grim as a box full of bullets?
Massachusetts Contemplates Moving to the Atlantic Time Zone
By Jennifer Martelli
All around my sister and my nephew and my niece: Texas,
terra cotta and ladybird blue.
Come home, I say to her, there’s a house on my street
you could move right into. My son
drums fast as a machine gun shoots,
drum skins split the way a half moon
splits in the sky. Massachusetts wants to hook
onto the Atlantic, pull itself east, one
hour out of the country.
Last night, on the Cape, nothing of this day
happened yet: I was far away from Sutherland Springs or closer to the bullet
curve. All around me: night, ocean, tumor, even the air
was midnight blue. The moon was a platinum-dyed
psychic. My sister REM sleeping, deep in a dry heart, in the heat.
Some people laid out their church clothes.
Read More
My father is concerned
my fourth-grade son isn’t learning math, the proper way, the rote way,
by memorizing tables, like he did as a child. A ruler to the wrist.
Over and again. I tell him the nearest gun store is 2.3 miles from
where my son is erasing a mistake, from where he is subtracting
the number of bullets emptied in sixty seconds, minus how many
times the heart beats in that frame, minus how many children can
fill a supply closet. Then add how many days it takes for a parent
to lose the sound of their child’s voice from memory (Less than you
think). My son, who is schooled in divergent thinking, recognizes x
as a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens—a funeral in the sky.
I tell my father—the old way isn’t working. He agrees, but then slips
back into criticizing, into the path he’s worn down, until again it rains.
Memorization as barbed wire, is tough to break, and when pulled
from a pocket of empty prayers, is circular reasoning, which is
without hope, which is the very definition of insane.