after Adrienne Rich

Tonight I think no poetry can serve: no earnest couplets
about the marvel of queer love being how it just is;

no conceit sustained long enough to create policy change,
to bring back the queers killed before or after me;

no simile acute enough to capture the acrid pit of my stomach
as another queer teen is bullied into suicide;

no aphorisms from elected officials making trite beauty of queer
blood on the linoleum or blue-lipped silence from both sides of the aisle;

no caesura for Stonewall. For Pulse. For Q. For Otherside. For
any litany of queer spaces made off-limits by webs of yellow tape;

no onomatopoeia for the crack of queer skulls on pavement, the snap
of their bones under excessive force, the void of who they were;

no ekphrasis on the candle-lit vigils held by those queers left,
on the rainbow flags hoisted by allies in death’s wake;

no meter to understand queer murder: no gunshots measured
in trochee, iamb, dactyl, or anapest;

no negative capability following the morning’s headlines: Shooting
at Queer Bar Kills Five. Flurries of texts: I need to know you are still alive;

no ars poetica will wield me the power to stop their murders, to step
outside in the luxury of my own queerness knowing I’m not next;

no metonym for gun violence beyond thinking and praying:
verbs disgraced go on doing nothing but cataloguing the dead.

 *Note: The first and last lines of this poem borrow from “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” by 
 Adrienne Rich (Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, 2011, W. W. Norton & Company)

Neal Allen Shipley (he/him) is a behavior analyst living in Colorado with a modest collection of pets and an unhinged collection of plants. His other work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Impostor, Creation Magazine, The Talon Review, and SCAB Magazine, among others. Despite the horrors, he loves a fancy hot dog. You can find him on Instagram @nealio9