Tag: guns

Two Poems by Morrow Dowdle

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I Decline the Order of Protection

I knew I had landed in Oregon because the airport speakers
were playing 80s goth rock and there were lots of people dressed
like skater punks or lumberjacks retrieving their luggage.
And the bathroom was all-gender, white and bright-lit
as a futuristic chapel, each stall with a door fully flush
with the floor. I stepped up to the bank of sinks
beside a buttoned-up cop. I admit I’m still scared of men
sometimes, and my mother-in-law’s crime dramas don’t help.
But not there, the officer and I just trying to eliminate
our bodies’ waste. He wasn’t pretending to be a man—
he was a man. Nor was the woman in the church bathroom
back home pretending to be a woman. Nor was she afraid
to wear a leather jacket and skirt to the service—that requires
real courage. She was taking her two little girls to pee,
each whining on the toilet. I was washing my son’s hands
as he resisted the soap. The woman and her kids came out,
and she and I rolled our eyes at each other, no longer
strangers as we sympathized about how our children
drive us nuts. She was just any other mother except
for the small lump at her throat that can never go away.
As if she carries some small sadness. And goes on anyway.

*

And Then, We Hear It

That is, I hear it, and then
she enters my bedroom.
Face stricken.

I heard it, she says. Something
booming. I don’t correct her,
don’t say shooting.

The book of essays stays
open on my lap. I’m reading
the scholar’s message

to the would-be confessional poet.
Their recommendation? Your verse
should be more gospel

than gossip. The only hymn
at present a ringing in my ears.
Aren’t you scared?

she asks. I tell again the saddest
lie—No, I reply. I cut her
loose in her fear, make

my face maddeningly flat.
And what could I say about
the stray bullet that found me

in Chicago. Or the ones
that fly by no accident
into a brother’s or sister’s

chest or head. Men do kill,
whether it’s bird or deer
or a queer who’s been known

to hold a red card, sitting
out here in the country
with my daughter,

where the KKK still lurks
in corners. Then there’s
the adrenaline of executive
orders, the line not far
from Klan to militia.
It’s probably someone

hammering, she says.
Yes, I say. I like that
explanation. I like us

to think that someone’s
out there in the dark
on a silver ladder, nails

sprouting from their mouth.
So eager to build a house
they could not wait for morning.

*

Morrow Dowdle is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the micro-chapbook Hardly (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Their work can be found in New York Quarterly, The Baltimore Review, Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. They run a performance series which features BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ voices. They are an MFA candidate at Pacific University and live in Durham, NC.

Two Poems by Vincent Casaregola

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Night at the Convenience Store

It’s not like there’s something wrong,
not like you’d think—no inner demon
willing me to kill or be killed, inspiring
some direct-to-video tragedy—

what I hear is softer, a whisper
of secrets and the sound of shadows
sliding slowly over hollow space,
someone else’s ghosts, not mine.

Some people broadcast themselves,
and I, despite myself, receive
an endless chain of repetitious fears,
the plainsong of pathetic histories.

At home, at night, the soft sounds
of furnaced air surrounding me,
I’d still find no peace, deafened almost
by the family’s atonal dreams.

So now I work the graveyard shift at the
convenience store, as ghosts come and go,
some in awkward bodies, some in minds,
and a few, just a few, carried on the wind.

*

In the Sunlight

Black letters, “Do Not Cross,”
on shiny yellow tape, rising and
falling on the afternoon breeze,
rustling, surrounding the site

Bright yellow, with black numbers,
the bent plastic markers, just like
what restaurants use to tag the order,
scattered randomly on black asphalt

Brass casings, cast like seed
on hard ground, some still smooth,
some dented, but each one shining
in the hot, late-summer sun.

*

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, The Closed Eye Open, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, La Piccioletta Barca, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, Work, and The Write Launch. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) that has been accepted by Finishing Line Press.

God, Who Gives These Young Men Guns? by Elizabeth Edelglass

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God, Who Gives These Young Men Guns?

When I talk to God
I use masculine pronouns –
I hate to admit it.

Maybe because God
allowed twenty first-graders
to be slaughtered in school
in a town near mine,
while I was in the Stop & Shop
probably squeezing plums.

Ten years ago.

Who gives all these young men guns?
If God were a mother,
I don’t think She would do it.

*

Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer and book reviewer who finds herself writing poetry in response to today’s world—personal, national, and global. Her fiction has won the Reynolds Price Fiction Prize, the William Saroyan Centennial Prize, the Lilith short story contest, and the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poem “No Mention” recently won third prize in the Voices of Israel Reuben Rose Poetry Competition.

God, Guns & Ginny by W. D. Ehrhart

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God, Guns & Ginny

Well, of course it was righteous.
Bear any burden, pay any price,
what you could do for your country.
Godless communists, after all.
You may have been only seventeen,
but you’d seen them already
in Hungary, Cuba, Berlin.
Something had to be done,
and someone would have to do it.

There is something about a thatched-roof
hut in the middle of rice fields, burning,
a mortally wounded woman softly
keening, child dead in her arms,
that can’t be blamed on Chairman Mao,
Castro, Lenin, or Das Kapital.
Heavy artillery flattened that home.
Ours. Our guns did that.

Long before I reached my thirteen months,
I discovered I had nothing to cling to
but a girl back home. A young girl.
Still in high school. Watching her friends
go out on dates, having fun, enjoying
all of the things that seniors do
for the last exuberant time together.
She must have agonized for months
before she sent me that final letter.
I hope she’s had a nice life. I mean it.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.