Texas Shootings
Elegy for Uvalde
Thomas Hemminger
October 27, 2022
Upon your lamentation, Oh Uvalde,
The Texas Hills in silence stood,
The Nueces River stopped her coursing,
The white-tailed deer and javelina ceased their roaming,
The white-winged dove and moorhen waited and watched,
And even the sweet guajillo honey halted its flow.
We hear your lamentation, poor Uvalde.
We weep with you in disbelief.
Our hearts break with your hearts.
We sense the emptiness of your homes.
We catch the horrible echo of hate from darkest places,
Our human grief imparted for so great a loss.
We lift the lamentation of Uvalde
To Heaven’s throne room shining bright,
To where your children newly entered in.
May our love for them remain, undying, there
Where nowhere can be found an earthly care, and
Where they will live forever looking on the face of God.
Thomas Hemminger is an elementary music teacher living in Dallas, Texas. His personal hero is Fred Rogers, the creator of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It was through America’s favorite “neighbor” that Thomas learned of the importance of loving others and of giving them their own space and grace to grow.
Guns & Babies
Jeffrey L. Taylor
September 20, 2022
The neighbor’s truck
demands “Back Off,”
sports an AR-15 silhouette,
announces “Baby on Board,”
all in the same shade of red.
I wonder if the gun
is his baby.
This state’s laws
love guns more than babies.
My state taxes support this.
My state government and I
are moving in opposing directions.
Jeffrey L. Taylor retired in 2001 after 40 years as a Software Engineer. Around 1990, poems started holding his sleep hostage, unexpected for someone who did poorly in English classes. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, Texas Poetry Calendar, Tejascovido, the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Texas Poetry Assignment.
The Emptiness of Hollow Men
Janelle Curlin-Taylor
August 21, 2022
I feel a great emptiness
Listening to accounts of a recent
School shooting.
A whole town trusting in guns
Not in love
Not in a Higher Power
Not in common sense
Not in safety protocols
Just guns.
Nineteen children, two teachers dead
One grandmother's face
Blown off
Nineteen trained men
Armed to the teeth
Kevlar vests, macho mottos
Standing outside with faith
In their beloved guns
Inside, little children
Bleed and die.
Faith without works is death.
Janelle Curlin-Taylor is descended from several generations of Texas poets. Her poetry has appeared in the di-verse-city Anthology, Blue Hole, Best Austin Poetry 2018 - 2019, Waco WordFest Anthology 2020, Texas Poetry Calendar 2021, Texas Poetry Assignments, the forthcoming Lone Star Poetry anthology from Texas Poetry Assignment, and Voices de la Luna. She is married to California poet Jeffrey Taylor.
Jays
Elisa A. Garza
August 14, 2022
We argue, squawking and territorial
like Blue Jays afraid of losing
when we should be nesting,
creating a safe secure place
for our children to learn.
Schools are not that haven,
but we hover and dive,
pecking at the other jays
instead of talking honestly
about what guns are for,
who should have rights to them,
how to secure a school building
so guns and their shooters stay out,
so children can learn in peace,
about peace and peacemaking,
can learn to solve this problem
for once, for always, for all of us.
Elisa A. Garza, a native Houstonian, has published two chapbooks, Entre la Claridad (Mouthfeel Press, soon to appear in a second edition) and Familia (The Portlandia Group). She has taught students from elementary through senior citizens in public schools, universities, and community programs. Currently, she works as a freelance editor.
Hero of Sutherland Springs
Seth Wieck
August 7, 2022
accolades will no doubt be lavished on Stephen Willeford, who...had already used his weapon to take a crack at the gunman fleeing the First Baptist Church...- The New York Times
Stephen Willeford is “no stranger to pain,” he says, but he remembers crying more the first week after the shooting than he had the rest of his life combined.- Texas Monthly
Prairie dog burrows break
horses’ legs. You ever shoot a
horse your daughter named?
Horses twitch and flop,
bucking to get back up, then
buckle and fall again.
The horse’s name was
Star, for the mark on her head.
That is where I aimed
the first shot. Two shots
settled it. Living bodies
want to keep living.
I was napping when
my daughter woke me. “Do you
hear gunshots?” she asked.
Barefoot in the street,
I called him a name I don’t
want to repeat here.
My momma washed my
mouth for cursing my brother.
Jesus called that murder.
He was flesh and blood.
I’ve since called him a demon.
Demon— but a man.
His lung must have burst,
spilling air, breathed image of
God, filling with blood.
Whistling, gurgling words;
syllables slipping in blood.
What is it he said?
No doubt because I'm
her father, my daughter will
curse men with my words.
Daughter, Daughter sing.
Name the horse. Name her rider
True, True and Faithful.
Seth Wieck's writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Grand Little Things, and Ekstasis Magazine. His story "Plaster Madonna" is forthcoming in Belle Point Press's Mid/South Anthology. He lives in Amarillo with his wife and three children.
Texas in Seventy-Eight Minutes.
Donna Freeman
July 27, 2022
“I’m sorry,” he said,
“I lost my glasses.”
His mother looked at him,
reassurance lay stuck in her throat.
Drenched in disbelief at
who had died,
that his innocence survived,
that those innocents were no longer,
she could only press him closer,
look in his eyes.
Attempting a smile
she managed to say
to her eight-year-old son,
her only one,
“You see so well without them.
Your teacher would’ve been proud.”
Donna Freeman started writing poetry at age twelve. Her work has appeared in the Wilderness House Literary Review, the Blue Lake Review, and Ocean State Poet’s Anthology: Giving Voice. Donna's poetry was also selected for Rhode Island Public Radio’s "Virtual Gallery 2020." She is active in several poetry groups.
Uvalde Cowboy Poetry
Daniel Doeden
July 20, 2022
Daniel Doeden the author of the recent novel, Reckonings published in trade paperback and digital in April 2020 by TouchPoint Press, also the crime thriller Leverage, published in hardcover by Gale/Cengage’s former Five Star imprint. Reckonings won the following awards: the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards First Place Winner Young Adult/New Adult Novel, and the 2021 Finalist winner of The WILLA Literary Award for fiction.
I Didn’t Want to Read...
Suzanne Morris
June 26, 2022
the names of nineteen pupils
and two teachers
on that Sunday’s list of
Souls Departed in
Prayers of the People
fearing as I stood before
the congregation that
I might mispronounce
a single precious one.
Didn’t want to read how
policemen stood inert outside
while children inside
pleaded for help
in the little town near
Garner State Park where
my high school friends once
took family vacations
to swim in the Frio River and
sleep outdoors
under a blanket of
innocent stars.
Didn’t want to read about
the pediatrician who
couldn’t find the words
to describe
the effects of shots fired from
an assault weapon
upon the bodies of
third and fourth graders
or the husband who
died of cardiac arrest while
planning his teacher wife’s
funeral.
Didn’t want to read about
the child from the broken home
who was bullied so relentlessly
because he stuttered
that he grew into a monster.
I didn’t want to read that we
must not expect too much,
too soon, of those tasked with
passing modest gun laws
in hallowed halls
under iconic domes
where soaring flights of stairs
lead to massive doors
that shut out the public’s
anguished cries.
A novelist with eight published works spanning forty years, Suzanne Morris now focuses largely on writing poems. Her poetry is included in the anthology, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020). Examples have also appeared in The Texas Poetry Assignment and The New Verse News.
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.
She Will Have Sunflowers
Kathryn Merry
June 21, 2022
She will have sunflowers
They were her favorite
And you will have the right to buy an AR15
She will have sunflowers
And die at 9 at the hands of
A boy who hunted her down a hallway
In her American public school
Past her crayon-colored drawing
Of the American flag
She will have sunflowers
And you will have the right to bear arms
At the price of her mother’s arms, bare
Is this what we are fighting for?
She will have sunflowers
And be buried by her community on Memorial Day
In a child-sized casket shipped in from
Another city because Uvalde did not have enough
Did not have enough
She will have sunflowers
Laid all over it, her favorite,
What she would have wanted, what she would have wanted
Was to live
What she would have wanted
Was gun control
Can that be what she is buried with instead
the votes to make it law etched as hashmarks on her gravehead
She will have sunflowers
And you can have an AR15
This is the American dream
Mothers close their eyes and scream
Mothers, close your eyes and scream
Kathryn Merry was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and spent most of her adult life as an actress based in New York. She is currently living and writing in North Texas with her young family and rascal dog Ralph. Her poetry was featured in Soul Art Renewal by the Greater Denton Arts Council and published by the Denton Poets Assembly in When Poets Meet Poets: A Read and Respond Anthology.
The Guard
Thomas Quitzau
June 4, 2022
Short wide shadow glides across close-cut grass:
The ospreys are here.
I’m not sure what triggers the smaller birds,
Slow ominous projections? Or maybe
It’s the automatic firing of its
Fierce call piercing the thick green canopy:
Roughly 19 shots all in succession.
The circling raptors live somewhere near here
But not here here, in this patch of trees.
You can tell by the way the little birds
Freeze—most are still, eerily, some skitter.
And then, invariably emerges
One—shockingly direct—almost as if
She was waiting, as if she were trained to
Strike—darting straight to strike his tail feathers,
Her shot across the dangerous stranger’s
Bottom followed by gutsy yells (part of
Her tough training), her martial artist “HA!”
Barely moved and seemingly unperturbed,
The black-and-white hector moves on to search
For unprepared groves, those perhaps lacking
Even a single paladin waiting
To stand up for those who have only just
Learned to fly.
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.
If a Mother Delights
Antoinette F. Winstead
June 3, 2022
For the hand that rocks the cradle
is the hand that rules the world.
William Ross Wallace (1819 – 1881)
They discussed in breathless delight
the Valentine love tokens
bestowed upon them
by their husbands
not chocolate filled candy boxes
wrapped in red velvet ribbons
nor sparkling diamonds
set in princess cut settings
these love tokens.
Yet they trilled and thrilled
over what had been bestowed them
by their loving husbands
hard cold steel
with fifteen rounds standard
so delighted were they
with these shows of affection
proof their husbands loved them enough
to provide them deadly protection.
And we wonder at the destruction
constantly around us
done by these love-gifted tokens?
If a mother delights
in receiving deadly panoply
how can we expect society
to ever see the wrong
in something so easily acquired
lovingly bestowed?
Antoinette F. Winstead, a poet, playwright, director, and actor, teaches film and theater courses at Our Lady of the Lake University where she serves as the Program Head for the Mass Communication and Drama programs. Her poetry has been published in The Ekphrastic Review, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, Voice de la Luna, and the 2022 Texas Poetry Calendar. For her poem “Life Is” she was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize by the editor of Jerry Jazz Musician.
A Love that a Gunman Has for a Gun
Paola Brinkley
June 1, 2022
I hope Americans can love their children
as much as they love their guns
for they don’t send their guns
to schools that are underfunded and unprotected.
I hope Americans can defend their children
as much as their right to bear arms,
from the crumbling foster care system,
that forces children to sleep in CPS offices, waiting endlessly for placements,
that leaves children susceptible to physical and sexual abuse
and abandons them on the streets with a life forced into crime,
and from the national shortage of baby formula,
that forces mothers to water down formula
for just long enough for the next paycheck,
for just long enough for the next shipment at the grocery store.
I hope Americans can vouch for their children’s mental health
Like they vouch that guns are not the problem,
To support children when they are bullied in school,
To believe a child’s feelings of depression and anxiety,
To understand that these children are not asking for attention,
But asking for your help in this mental health crisis.
I hope Americans can clutch their children at night,
To read them bedtime stories,
To kiss them on the cheek,
To hug them tightly as they drift off to sleep,
As tightly as we grip our AR-15 rifles.
For a love a gunman has for his gun
Cannot rival a love for a child.
Paola Brinkley is a graduate assistant at Lamar University. She teaches Composition I and Integrated Reading and Writing and tutors at the Writing Center. Paola will graduate in December 2022 with her M.A in English.
Phobia:
Karen Cline-Tardiff
June 1, 2022
derived from the Greek Phobos meaning aversion or fear.
Is there a word for being scared to go to school?
Didaskaleinophobia:
derived from the Greek Didasko meaning to teach
19 children in Uvalde were not scared of learning
the difference between good and bad
And how can you be a good guy
when you still have a gun pointed at someone?
They weren’t afraid of their teachers
Teachers who were afraid and still
threw themselves on the children.
Teachers who were never taught
how to sacrifice themselves,
but they did.
Agoraphobia:
the irrational fear of crowded or open spaces.
19 children in Uvalde weren’t scared of their classmates crowding around the teacher to learn,
butterflies under glass, pinned down,
Are we talking about nature or slaughter?
19 children in Uvalde unafraid of running outside
at recess to swing and climb on the jungle gyms,
Are they running for their lives?
Hoplophobia:
Now we’re getting closer to the truth, to the fear of guns.
19 children in Uvalde who had seen Daddy hunt,
played with Super Soakers,
Is it all just conditioning at this point?
They still feared that assault rifle,
because they knew what it represented.
The failure of the adults in their lives
to take away the sticks and stones
that are breaking bones and killing children.
Athazagoraphobia:
The fear of being forgotten.
19 children in Uvalde who I’m scared of forgetting,
because their names will be replaced any day now.
How many more children are we willing to forget,
How many more children are we willing to sacrifice?
19 children with names and stories and brothers
and sisters and mothers and fathers and tias and abuelas.
146 children killed by guns THIS YEAR and we’ve already
forgotten their names. Or did we even know them?
Karen Cline-Tardiff has been writing as long as she could hold a pen. Her works have appeared in several anthologies and journals, both online and in print. She founded the Aransas County Poetry Society. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Gnashing Teeth Publishing. Find her at karenthepoet.com
Rumble
Kathryn Jones
May 31, 2022
I hear a rumble in the distance
A thunderstorm is on the way
Black clouds mass on the horizon
Another army led astray
I hear a rumble in the distance
War and murder stalk the Earth
Children’s blood spilled in the hallways
They were doomed right from their birth
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s coming closer every day
No gun is large enough to stop it
No feet fast enough to run away
I hear a rumble in the distance
A million marching toward the door
Of the chambers of the chosen
Who favor the rich over the poor
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s growing louder all the time
The reckoning is fast approaching
The bell will toll, the clock will chime
I hear a rumble in the distance
It will soon be at the feet
Of those who perpetrate injustice
The time has come for their defeat
I hear a rumble in the distance
It’s the sound of wind and rain
Washing clean the battered landscape
And the bloody human stain
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 the upcoming 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.
And the Land Wept
Roberta Shellum Dohse
May 30, 2022
The thunder cracked and split the sky
and roared across the plain.
The lightning struck and split the rock
and nothing was the same.
The shelf of rock it cracked apart
and splintered as it flew —
far, over the edge of the world.
And the land wept
for the loss
of such a piece of itself.
Roberta Shellum Dohse hails primarily from California. After living on a farm in northern Minnesota and in Oregon, she moved to Texas in 1980, attended law school, and has practiced law in Corpus Christi since 1997. Formerly a flight instructor and a college professor, she has always loved to write.
Manolin and Isbel
Jesse Doiron
May 29, 2022
I’ve
seen the heads of children bloodied by the bat, the monkey bars, and even little fists,
but the bullet
wound behind an ear now broken bone, pieces
of his brain, clumped
and clotted
in dark hair,
behind his emptied hazel eyes
and airless smile—
I had not seen
that kind of
blood before.
He
died, they said, quickly, in the arms of Isbel, the little girl from Mrs. Browning’s class,
who always made
an “A” in reading. The one he liked so much
he said that they
would marry,
and he would
make her happy ever after,
when they were big
and old enough
for children
of their own.
Jesse Doiron spent 13 years overseas in countries where he often felt as if he were a “thing” that had human qualities but couldn’t communicate them. He teaches college, now, to people a third his age. He still feels, often, as if he is a “thing” that has human qualities but can’t communicate them.
A Texas Shattering
Milton Jordan
May 29, 2022
If some Word somewhere uttered this world
into being, it mispronounced itself.
Word may have stuttered or lost the grammar
of language, left creation unbalanced,
so we have swung round to destruction
and lost touch with Word’s life-creating presence.
This world has created words of its own,
built itself a life-denying language
more concerned with securing questionable
rights than with saving innocent lives,
avoiding any responsibility,
disregarding Word’s ongoing offer of life.
Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He is editing a volume of selections from the first year of Texas Poetry Assignment. His collection, A Forest for the Trees, is forthcoming from Backroom Window Press.
Secret Place
Chris Ellery
May 29, 2022
Some days in my childhood
I needed no one to find me.
Some of those days, I could slip away
as soon as I was dead,
raise the old door that covered the hole
in the brick foundation,
squirm under,
and shut it behind me.
Outside there were things to be done.
There were parents.
There were warnings
and expectations and big
brothers running about
killing, killing
zombies, headhunters, heretics,
outlaws, Indians, jerries and gooks.
They always killed me first,
the littlest one,
and in the thrill of their game,
paid me no mind when I slipped away.
Under the house it was cool and still.
Bricks muffled the guns and grenades.
There were spiders and mice,
a dusty wood smell, darkness
spelled by slivers of light
passing through chinks in the brick.
There was watchful, watery peace
something like sleep.
Chris Ellery of San Angelo is a frequent contributor to and avid reader of TPA.
Song for America
Fernando Esteban Flores
May 28, 2022
XLVIII
(For the children of Uvalde & their teachers)
Everybody’s got a pistol everybody’s got .45
The philosophy seems to be at least as near as I can see
When all the other folks give up theirs I’ll give up mine
Poet Gil Scott shook things up with those lines
But politics & partisans got people on the run
Arm teachers worship god with a loaded gun
AR 15 ok at 18 & all the weapons in between
NRA jiggles jingles to state their case
A good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun
& the homespun jive runs amok to defend a deadly right
Shout it out shoot it out school zones kill zones
Second Amendment trumps debate
Blast the eagle in a sea of bloody hate
Bomb the ballot box coup d’ etat
Liquidate the nation’s assets
In broad daylight
You don’t need an explanation
When everyone fears extermination
End the so-called Constitution
Beacon on the hill bunker hill
Remember the Alamo come & take it
Give me liberty or give me death
Bullets back bluster bluster breeds bigots
But you can’t fake the grief stuffed caskets
A pyrrhic victory for civil defeat
Common good fails common sense
Common sense lacks any consequence
& all our better angels bolt in disgrace
Everybody’s got a pistol everybody’s got .45
The philosophy seems to be at least as near as I can see
When all the other folks give up theirs I’ll give up mine
Fernando Esteban Flores is a native son of Tejas, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, published three books of poetry: Ragged Borders, Red Accordion Blues, & BloodSongs available through Hijo del Sol Publishing, published in multiple journals, reviews, newspapers, and online sites, selected in 2018-19 by the Department of Arts & Culture of the City of San Antonio, with support from Gemini Ink for his poem Song for America V (Yo Soy San Antonio) as one of 30 poems/poets to commemorate the City’s Tricentennial anniversary, and recently named poetry editor of the Catch the Next Journal of Ideas & Pedagogy.