Gregory Luce
251
for El Paso and Dayton
It’s Sunday morning in America.
The sun shines on gun barrels
and spent shells. How many shells
scatter on the ground when
eighty-two people are shot?
Could you build a house with them
or just another gun?
If all that smoke collected
into one single cloud, how long
would it blot out the sun?
If all the shots were fired
at the same time would the noise
drown out the sound of bodies
hitting the ground?
It’s Sunday morning in America,
a once-shiny apple rotting in the sun.
Editors Note: After the shootings in Dayton and El Paso on August 4, 2019, news outlets began reporting the there had been 251 mass shootings in the US in 2019 by that date—more than one per days in the first 216 days of the year.
Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line Press, 2016). In addition to numerous journals, his poems have appeared in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), Unrequited: An Anthology of Love Poems about Inanimate Objects (CreateSpace, 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers: An Anthology of Mixed-Genre Mysteries (CreateSpace, 2016). He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, Va.
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