Tag: school shooting

Equality: In Memoriam

By Joani Reese

Five decades stunned, gone mute with disbelief.
Fixed rules destroyed; religion bares its teeth.
Six judges’ force unwanted, fetal crowns
through pro tempore vaginas, MAGA-owned.
Five men conspired to sully settled law,
one last false flag claimed Roe too hot to touch
claimed lawful norms were stone, inviolate.
Judge Amy lied, fired Roe v. down to ash.

New words govern pudenda, ultrasound.
Impregnate everyone! Sinners, repent!
Ectopic pregnancies are heaven-sent,
and off forked tongues agitprop overflows.
We’re here to save the children, bless their souls.
It’s not about control of women’s wombs!
We’ll birth a million babes, a few may come
from incest or a rape that’s forced to term.

Have patience, mom, you’ll be alone again
in five short years,
grade school,
white male
a gun.

Joani Reese is a poet and writer living in Texas.  Reese has been a poetry editor for THIS Magazine, Senior Poetry Editor for Connotation Press, and General Editor of MadHat Lit. Reese has won awards for her poetry and flash fiction. Her hybrid book Night Chorus was published by LitFest Press in 2015.

Photo credit: Richard Harvey via a Creative Commons license.

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Velocity Squared

By Flavian Mark Lupinetti

 

when the gun smoke clears
and the EMTs bring the bodies to my ER
and I ask why they bothered and they say
we need someone to pronounce them most
times I say you pronounced them just fine
but today I can’t bear to make that joke
because these aren’t so much bodies as
they are chunks of protoplasm subordinated
to the law of physics that dictates force
equals mass over two times velocity squared

when the gun smoke clears
I reflect how clever of Eugene Stoner
who shrewdly designed his AR-15
to fire rounds of a petite .223 caliber
but to propel them at 3200 feet per
second because how else to
penetrate steel plate at 500 yards or
disarticulate a leg from the pelvis
with a flesh wound below the knee
unless you rely on velocity squared

when the gun smoke clears
it still amazes me that these
headless corpses and these
exploded chests each resulted
from a single shot yet it makes
perfect sense mathematically
if you want to create an exit wound
the size of an orange with a bullet
smaller than your Bic pen
you need that velocity squared

 

Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a poet, fiction writer, and cardiac surgeon, received his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in About Place, Barrelhouse, Bellevue Literary Review, Briar Cliff Review, Cutthroat, Sport Literate, and ZYZZYVA. Mark lives in New Mexico.

Image credit: Jasper Nance 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 from our Give a Sawbuck page.