SURVIVOR, ROBB ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, UVALDE, TEXAS

Charlotte Muse

June 23, 2022

-Miah Cervillo, eleven years old, her eyes large behind her glasses, her shirt emblazoned with yellow sunflowers and the words "Live in the Sun," stood before cameras and described the scene.

How her teacher got an e-mail and went to lock the door 

and made eye contact with a gunman in the hallway.  

How she told the class to hide, and they hid 

behind the teacher's desk or the pile of backpacks.

How the gunman went to an adjoining classroom and came 

into hers.  How he told her teacher Goodnight 

and shot her in the head and then her classmates and a whiteboard.

When I went to the backpacks he shot 

my friend that was next to me

and I thought he was going to 

come back to the room 

so I grabbed 

a little 

blood

and put it all over me

said the child who is no longer a child,

said the shock that flattened everything she said, 

said the courage it took her to speak of it

because these deaths must mean something;

they must persuade the powerful who refuse 

to be persuaded to change the laws that made it possible—

although she didn't say all those words.  

She just told us 

what happened.  

Charlotte Muse has published four chapbooks and a book of selected poems, In Which I Forgive the River (Broadstone Books, 2021)— her first full-length collection. She likes to sit at the bottom of a nearby dry creek and stare into space. She lives, teaches, and writes in California.