On the Road to Samarra
By Marissa Glover
“I shall ride like the wind to Samarra . . . and Death will not find me there.”
—from the ancient fable The Appointment in Samarra
I met a man in Utah
with a bullet in his neck,
shot from a rooftop —
a coward’s distance
not like the lady in Minnesota,
killed up close by a gun
by the finger that pulled the trigger
by a person who didn’t know her:
dog lover, Girl Scout leader,
part-time worker in her dad’s
auto parts store
shot from a rooftop—
a coward’s distance
like the D.C. sniper
like a desert drone drop
like the Devil of Ramadi
long-range equipment
with records over 10,000 feet
still no match for Boeing 767s
or 757s striking from the sky:
25,000 feet in a power dive
I met 3,000 people in New York,
20 children in Connecticut,
14 teenagers in Parkland, Florida
I met a man in Utah who died
never knowing he’d been hit,
and I met a man in Memphis
briefly conscious of it
I saw the dead already dead
riding in a convertible in Dallas
back in 1963—all travelers
in this one mad world, just people
on the road to Samarra,
same as you, same as me
Marissa Glover lives in Florida, where she’s busy swatting bugs and dodging storms. Her work has been featured in journals and anthologies around the world. Marissa’s poetry collections are published by Mercer University Press: Let Go of the Hands You Hold (2021) and Box Office Gospel (2023). Her third book of poetry, Some Intangible Mercy, will be released by MUP in early 2027. Follow Marissa on Instagram.
Photo credit: Wasfi Akab via a Creative Commons license.
A Note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist on our Give a Sawbuck page.