Texas Shootings
The Anger Stage
Thomas Quitzau
May 28, 2022
Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas
Tuesday, May 24th, 2022 11:30 am CDT
I am inside, crouching near the front entrance
I can see you coming, dressed in black
I see you are holding a rifle, you are creepy
Why are you here?
Did you read the sign GUN FREE ZONE?
Do you know who is in here?
Do you know what they are doing?
Do you know what you are doing?
Do you know anyone here?
You are a coward.
I order you to STOP, to FREEZE
I yell HANDS IN THE AIR
You ignore me.
“Bang bang bang bang —
You’re dead.”
Thomas Quitzau is a poet and teacher who grew up in the Gulf Coast region and who worked for over 30 years in Houston, Texas. A survivor of Hurricane Harvey, he recently wrote a book entitled Reality Showers, and currently teaches and lives on Long Island, New York with his wife and children.
Land of the Free
Steve Wilson
May 28, 2022
Find comfort, children. You are free. Free
to cower in corners, under desks, in closets.
Free to paint yourself wounded with your best friend’s blood
so the shooter will think you are dead, too.
Free to reach ten years of age,
or eight years of age, or seven. No more.
Free to call the police who wait confused outside,
then whisper repeatedly for their help.
Free to run screaming from your elementary school –
AK15 shots echoing along the hallways.
Free to have your last photo taken at school –
you made the Honor Roll on the day you were shot.
Free to fear every day. Free to die
for the 2nd Amendment as if it is still 1797
and patriotic farmers wander the fields with their rusty muskets.
Free to hear the moans and rattling breaths of
dying classmates. Free to be someone’s dying classmate.
Free to be a bloody sacrifice to other people’s selfishness,
paranoia, cowardice, desire for power, insecurities.
Free to join the grim tableau of American carnage.
Free to be a target of revenge for perceived injustices.
Free to be the NRA’s little annoyance. Free
to avoid being “politicized.” Free to be forgotten,
or appropriated, or silenced, or a victim of “culture.”
Free to imagine violence. Free to fuel violence. Free
to embody violence. To wait and wait, but not be saved.
Steve Wilson's poems have appeared in journals and anthologies nationwide. He is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent entitled The Reaches. His next collection, Complicity, is due out in Spring 2023. He lives in San Marcos, TX.
Uvalde, Just North Of La Pryor
Juan Manuel Pérez
May 28, 2022
John 16:33 NLT
I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me.
Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows.
But take heart, because I have overcome the world.
City of some of my very first
dreams and memories
City of my sibling’s birth
and plenty of other relatives
City of most of my parents’ habits,
haunts, and shopping activities
Oh, how I grew to learn
your impact on my family
City of my small-time hangouts
and cruising down Getty and Main
City of the Purple Sage Dance Hall
and pretty, Saturday night chances
City of my athletic exhibition
and my college prep life
Oh, how I thrived within you,
Oh, beautiful city of the green trees
City of some first poetic endeavors
and part of my early writings
City of my initial
and accidental teaching career
City of many friends and relatives
and now my grandson’s place of birth
Oh, how I celebrated within you
in blissful happiness
Now, a city of victimized darkness
and too many innocent dead
Oh, how I weep for you in deep desperation
and inconsolable sorrow
Juan Manuel Pérez, a Mexican-American poet of indigenous descent and the 2019-2020 Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas, grew up as a migrant worker in the many fields of the La Pryor, Crystal City, and Uvalde area before military life and teaching, and before re-locating to the Coastal Bend Area. He has written several books of poetry including the new one, CASUAL HAIKU (2020). https://juanmperez.weebly.com/
Prayers Don’t Stop Bullets
Carlos Loera
May 28, 2022
Prayers don’t stop bullets
When is enough
What is enough
When our prayers seem distant
Blood soaked children
Innocence is lost
While you fight for power
Take blood money for votes
Make money on children’s death
Blood soaked politicians
Gaslighting us every time
Power-hungry politicians don’t cry
Band-aids on the open scars of children
Never heal
Prayers heal
But prayers never stop bullets
Carlos Loera teaches at San Antonio College as an Adjunct Faculty member. He paints, draws, and writes poetry.
after a school shooting: the clean up crew
Sister Lou Ella Hickman
May 28, 2022
today
i want to write
about the cleanup crew
those who see what we do not
and perhaps never will:
the desks
the white boards
the closets
o yes and the floors
how do they feel
when they kneel down
to pick up the books
the lunch boxes
the artwork
scattered amid the chaos of blood
they must mop up
what do they feel
when they go home
when they open the door
when they sit in their easy chair
and drink their first stiff drink
Sister Lou Ella’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines as well as several anthologies. She was also a Pushcart nominee in 2017 and 2020. Press 53 published her first book of poetry entitled she: robed and wordless in 2015. She is a third-generation of four generations of teachers.
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.
Rage for Uvalde
Kathryn Jones
May 26, 2022
Do not let this one pass –
mutilated bodies lying still
on the classroom floor
while you, safe in your house,
tuck your children into bed tonight.
Do not wake up and watch
the news on TV, thinking
it cannot happen here.
It happened in their “here”
while you went about your day.
Do not pray for Uvalde’s parents;
they do not need your prayers,
they need your anger, your resolve
while you post your kids’ pictures
of their last day of school on Facebook.
Do not cry for Uvalde’s dead;
they do not need your tears.
They need your rage against politicians
who smile while they take blood money,
then put on sad faces for the cameras.
Do not pretend you are concerned
when you do nothing because you think
nothing can be done. The next shooter
is loading ammo and looking at maps
while you drive your children to school.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
Hearing of Uvalde while Visiting Vilnius
Alan Berecka
May 26, 2022
I saw a woman begin to weep
as she walked through the basement
cells beneath the KGB museum.
"Overwhelmed, just overwhelmed,"
she said, "By the inhumanity
of it all," overwhelmed in a foreign land,
overwhelmed forty years after the fact.
I do not tell her I come from Texas,
South Texas so near to Uvalde
where children at school, children
at school were gunned down.
I cannot explain how it is possible
for me to walk or even stand today,
cannot explain why I am not wearing
sackcloth and ashes, how could I explain
that I come from a country that loves guns
more than life, a land where even the worst
tragedies just leave us numb.
Alan Berecka earns a living as a reference librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. His poetry has appeared in many journals including The Concho River Review, The Windward Review, Ruminate, and The Christian Century. In 2017 he was named the first Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi.
I AM NOT ASHAMED OF CRYING AT WORK WHEN I HEAR ABOUT ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING
E. D. Watson
May 25, 2022
i am ashamed of not crying every time it happens.
by it i mean some guy with a gun goes into a school
a church a supermarket and unloads. sometimes i don’t.
cry, i mean. sometimes i am too busy. i am in the middle
of my to-do list, i close the browser, look away
because if i didn’t i’d always be hiding in the break room
clutching a damp ball of kleenex while a coworker
covers my shift, like i am today. people cannot live
like this. tomorrow there’ll be bouquets wrapped
in cellophane propped against a chain link fence.
there’ll be teddy bears and votive candles and photos
of the slain, we’ll click several dozen sad emojis
repost some memes about policy & change, vent
our rage, tag the governor, call out his cowboy ways
and in eight or nine days it will happen again.
we’ll call it shocking and unreal. by it i mean
what i said before. the holes in the classroom door.
blood. reporters. crime scene tape. it hurts
it hurts and is it perverse
to be glad i am crying
it proves i can still feel
E. D. Watson is a Poetic Medicine teacher and yoga instructor from Central Texas.
Such Knowledge
Michael Helsem
May 25, 2022
1.
things that should not be counted
sunsets witnessed
times making love
children killed by gunfire
2.
eagerness, each eager in their own way
to learn the forms of this planet
all its sights smells & tastes
suddenly this learning
comes to an end
some other child
disregarded, spurned, abandoned
given nothing but a stream of lies
& access to guns oh yes
access to guns
rooms full of guns
whole warehouses full of guns
guns guns guns
crude pictures of power
proven
when the trigger’s pulled
this sad child wanted that power
that damnable lie
& one other scene
though you & i can’t go there
in the politician’s office
dark wood panelled
whiskey cabinet
plenty of affordances
no need to hide it
no money moves from hand to hand
it is only
on computer records
that we see
mere ones & zeroes
zeroes & ones
where the real evil lives
3.
who can describe
those charged few minutes
last of someone’s life
by the sounds a gun makes
its flash & smell
or the sounds of frightened humans
who know
they are going to die
not to be told
even by survivors
more stone than knowledge
more dense than stone
a taste perhaps
what a dead star holds in its secret heart
4.
should we make the Earth a factory
for such knowledge
Michael Helsem was born in 1958. Shortly afterward, fish fell from the sky.
Chaos in Carnage
Chris Ellery
May 25, 2022
Chaos in carnage.
Kids, cops, EMTs in shock.
The bell rings.
Chris Ellery is the parent of three teachers and grandparent of three public school students.
What They Want
Michael Helsem
May 24, 2022
This is what they want
Though I would rather think
Massacres are a mistake
An unintended consequence
But how many times really
Can this excuse be repeated
Before it loses its sense
Becomes a dull wail
Over the shapes of the slain
And finally part of the background
Which none can see to challenge
This is
What they want
Michael Helsem was born in 1958. Shortly afterward, fish fell from the sky.
Nineteen Coffins
John Rutherford
May 24, 2022
An AR-15 can hold thirty rounds
in the magazine (even more after-market),
plenty to do the job, it seems.
It’s a light gun, all things considered,
black steel and plastic, with a trigger
so light a kid can set one off,
or I can, at the range with friends
or a cop can, at a suspect
or an angry young man
at some kids in Uvalde, Texas.
Does the undertaker shed a tear?
Nineteen little coffins, lined up
silk-covered springs and pillows arranged
so the little bodies can be tucked in,
to look as if they’re sleeping.
Does the mortician, with all his arts,
his craft honed for grandmothers, great uncles,
the special paint to hide the bullet wounds,
plasticky hands made up with cosmetic-care,
say a soft prayer over every little head?
Nineteen kids, lined up,
waiting for the school bus to come.
Nineteen little coffins, lined up,
waiting for a Cadillac to take them
home.
John Rutherford is a poet writing in Beaumont, Texas. Since 2018, he has been an employee in the Department of English at Lamar University. Since 2014, he has followed the events in Ukraine.