Poems

The School Shooting The hallway smells like floor wax and Friday morning donuts,Backpacks swinging, sneakers squeaking, nothing about this says what comes.Somewhere between second period and the fire drill nobody called,The world inside these walls gets small, gets loud, gets mauled. Hands that held the children tight against the classroom floor,Whispering “be quiet, be still” […]

The Refugee Crisis The tent’s been home for fourteen months, the canvas stained with rain,Her children draw the house they lost with crayons in the lane.A country’s just a memory pressed between her mother’s dressAnd the ID card that proves she’s real, though everything says less. The line for water starts at dawn, the line

The Pandemic’s Toll The masks came first, then the silence, then the math,Counting beds and body bags down the hospital’s back path.Hands that touched through glass and screen, missing what could have been,Hearts aching in a quiet plea, yearning for the company. Voices lost in muffled sound, funerals no one could attend,Lives that ended with

The Rapture of Release You let go, and it feels like breaking and mending all at once,Like every part of you that’s been wound too tight is suddenly free,Released from the prison you’ve built, brick by brick,Each wall you’ve stacked up against the world,Each cage you’ve locked yourself in,The chains you forged with your own

The Jobless Father His hands know work the way the lungs know air,Calloused palms that built and hauled and never learned despairUntil the plant closed and the severance ran dryAnd the mirror showed a man who couldn’t look his children in the eye. He fills out applications like he’s writing eulogies,Each rejection letter stacking up

The Mental Health Crisis The waiting list is six months long, the hotline’s on hold,The therapist takes insurance you don’t have, the story’s getting old.You fill out forms that ask you to rate your pain from one to ten,As if despair came in degrees, as if they’d call you back again. The pills they tried

The Opioid Crisis In a town of shuttered storefronts and porches gone to rot,The pills arrived like missionaries preaching what the doctors bought.They sold us comfort in a bottle, relief in 30-day supply,Then watched us stumble past the dosage into a slow goodbye. Hands that used to build and fix now shake for something small

The Homeless Shelter Fluorescent lights hum like they’re tired of being awake,Rows of cots lined up like headstones in a room that smells of bleach and yesterday’s mistakes.A father’s hands are rough and worn, cracked knuckles gripping a cup of coffee gone cold,His children sleep on donated sheets while the heater rattles stories nobody’s told.

The Hungry Child He learned to eat lunch slow so nobody would seeThat the bag was empty, that the bread was free.His stomach talks in class but he’s learned to cough on cue,To drown the sound of hunger with a noise the teacher’s used to. Dinner’s whatever the church van brings–Canned corn, white bread, the

The Evicted Family The notice came on yellow paper, taped beside the door,Thirty days to find another life, another floor.The kids don’t understand the boxes, think it’s some kind of game,But mama’s packing photographs and swallowing the shame. What fits inside a minivan? Not the marks on the kitchen wallWhere you measured how the children