Uvalde, America

Vincent Hostak

May 28, 2022

“America... I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.” - Allen Ginsberg

Before we arrived

thirsty for what wasn’t ours,

when all was all

this land between the draws

the Nueces and Sabinal,

a whole inferred in one name

shared by all places, Earth.

This Turtle Island,

where crafty Muskrat gathered dust

till it clung to cakes of rock and wattle,

held this place firm between the seas

and sometimes above them,

pinned to heaven by live oaks and desert willows.

This was before gunpowder.

We made our homes,

we built schools with sacred sun-burned brick

held our children safe

between the seas, sometimes above.

America,

you are not in your right mind,

and maybe have not been thus

since you were so named.

But, this? No more a deepening sickness,

you've hit bottom.

Perhaps you once

held your children safe

between the seas, sometimes above,

safer than rounds nestled tight

in air-cooled chambers,

each bred to perform,

comforted by a jacket of steel,

tapered and scored for a journey

faster than most things endure on this earth.

Your precious cargo, now, a cone

spins and carves its way through

young lungs, livers still growing,

tearing, shattering, splintering

until all is not all.

Until none can bear to look

at the now wretched,

sun-burned, blood-stained brick of so many schoolhouses

between the seas.

Each slug, each chamber, worshipped

like the wrongful right inferred

by their very presence on this earth.

America trains the gun and its rounds,

shapes each to the notes discharged

in our long, dismal exhaled chant:

we are never quenched, still thirsty

for what isn’t ours.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.