Today’s New Verse News: THE WATER COOLER and PLEASE
THE WATER COOLER
by Melanie Choukas-Bradley
Blood stains and a small section of police tape show the scene where multiple people were injured following an overnight shooting at the Dior Bar & Lounge in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday, Jan. 22, 2023. Credit: Michael Johnson/AP
*
Gather round the water cooler For the latest on the latest mass shooting How many dead, how many critical Let’s put our heads together and get the facts Where the wounded hid, how many rounds What the cops did and didn’t do The victims have our thoughts and prayers They have our attention We are talking about it, talking and talking Until talk turns to the next one
*
Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island, and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and has had many poems published by Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems during the past year, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won “Moon Prizes.” Melanie grew up in Vermont wandering the woods and fields and has never stopped wandering. She leads nature and history field trips for Smithsonian Associates, the US Botanic Garden, the Nature Conservancy, Politics & Prose Bookstore, and many other organizations in the Washington, DC area.
*
PLEASE
by William Aarnes
poetry makes nothing happen
poetry is never really part of anything
It can kill a man.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
*
Of course, there are other ways to kill—a knee pressed down on a neck; a quick, hard shove off a subway platform; a swerve onto a sidewalk; a brick dropped from a roof; the slow, sure work of something tasteless stirred into a sauce; a knife stuck through a partner’s heart... —but guns are so easy to have on hand they’ve help us fall into the habit of reaching for them to win lost arguments or end marriages or conclude our own lives by aimless firing into crowds. Having guns around, has moved us to elect whoever will pass and keep in force permissive laws meant to insure we’ll need guns to defend each other from gunfire. So can someone please post the poem everyone (even readers who prefer firing guns to reading) will want to share with friends because the poem’s so compelling about how we need justices who think laws must meet standards suggested by the phrase “well regulated militia” and (in a brilliant burst of well-targeted words) about how it’s criminal not to make crimes committed with guns the responsibility of not only the culprits but also the weapons’ makers and dealers? Please, someone, that poem. Stop me from buying a gun.
*
William Aarnes lives in New York.