“watched his childhood;
Amid strange faces and strange forms.”
“We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood.”
—MacReady (played by Kurt Russell)
in The Thing (1982)
“freedom which is a crater
I keep falling in.”
i: Prologue
Between Fourth of July 2025 and Memorial Day 2026,
there have 837 separate shooting incidents in Michigan,
In 325 days, there have been 15 mass shootings here,
about one mass shooting every 22 days. I started going
to mass shootings on July 4 last year. On my birthday,
mid-May, we reached 1,000 people shot in Michigan in
just 11 months. Currently, 1,042 people have been shot.
I have only one more month to go. I can’t do it anymore.
ii: Dialogue
On the way to Jackson, I pass a park, and a bail bonds office.
This is my first mass shooting I’ve gone to where the mass
shooter is a female, her bond set at a quarter of a million
dollars. A May 9 headline reads “Attempted murder charges
against shooting suspect dropped shortly after her arraignment.”
The victims: a 21-year-old male shot twice in the chest and
once in the arm, 28-year-old male shot in the face and arm,
25-year-old female shot in the pelvis, and 23-year-old female
shot in the arm. This doesn’t feel like a poem. I don’t feel
like writing a poem. I don’t feel sometimes driving to these
mass shootings. The repetition. The petitions that do nothing.
Worse. It seems to be spreading to all of us. A virus. I feel
disgusted. I discuss this with a woman who lives less than
a block from the shooting. I’m talking to a female about
a female mass shooter who just shot two females in the arm
and, of all places, the pelvis. The symbolism. The city bright
green today. I talk to her at the foot of her garden and
there are two men nearby. Anna and Dan and an unnamed
man who reminds me of Seasick Steve (the musician whose
name I thought was Steve Gone Wild, but is actually Steve
Gene Wold, half-guitarist-wizard half-pirate); his doppel-
gänger floats in and out of the discussion of danger and
anger and it’s very city focused, talk of Romulus, Detroit,
Jackson. And the three of them seem like they’d fit in with
the entourage of Action Bronson (of F*ck, That's Delicious
fame). They tell me Jackson needs more community gardens.
On the way here, I passed a bike park, another park, a b-ball
court, and then the abandoned park near their home with its
rusty swings and weeds and graffitied slide and need of
upkeep and another basketball court, but this with no nets.
They tell me it’s the youth, that we didn’t do mass shootings
when we were young, tells me he handled a gun at age 8,
has a gun now, says “the problem is the access.” Or is it
the excess? Its infinity. ∞. I ask this. He says they need gun safety.
I ask how gun safety is going to help a mass shooter. It seems
gun safety is an oxymoron. We talk more on how “it’s a vicious
cycle,” and when change is attempted “they get roadblocked
by the government.” Anna says the problem is the chronic
violence of TV, video games, music, movies. We’re not far
from Mount Evergreen Cemetery. I don’t know about
the mount, but there’s green everywhere today. I feel jaded.
It feels I’ve had this discussion before. Gun owners telling me
there’s too much access to guns. ? They’re nice. They’re open.
They’re enjoying the summer day. One heard the gunshots.
One didn’t. They tell me those who were shot know who did it,
but they don’t want to speak. News says people are afraid
to talk, worried about getting protection. There’s apparently
40 unsolved murders in Jackson. We chitchat. Wide open.
I worry America is guns. Guns won. Hell, it’s confusing.
It is Hell. Kamala Harris, a Democrat, brags about owning
a Glock. The Republican President can’t own a gun
due to his felony conviction. They talk about how you’re
safe if you keep your nose clean, if you “stay away from
trouble,” from “people congregating.” Perhaps we’re saying
you can prevent mass shootings by simply staying away
from people. The myth that COVID reduced mass shootings.
We trade one virus for another. I’m tired. We don’t have any
solutions. Or maybe we have too many solutions. There’s no
silver bullet. The conversations are triggering. You try to offer
up solutions but get shot down. We need to set our sites on
something better. The language is gun-drowned. Steve
tells me I need to go, that the dog wants to come out—
Zeus, their German Shephard. He tells me the dog’s hairs
are standing on end, that he wants to come after me, that
it’s best to leave. As I’m walking away, he shouts to my
backside, “If he doesn’t know you, he’s very aggressive!”
iii: Epilogue
The realization, driving home, is that this wasn’t the only
mass shooting in Michigan on May 9, another in Muskegon.
And, on May 9, more mass shootings in Reddick, Florida,
and in Lake Charles, Louisiana. We’re perfecting mass
shootings. We’re teaching the normalization of mass
shootings. Gun purchases increase after mass shootings.
The beauty is the ugliness. Gun violence and capitalism
F*ck each other. But there’s this strange revelation that it’s
the gun owners who get killed. It’s gun owners who have
increased suicides in their homes. It’s gun owners who have
increased homicides in their homes. It’s gun owners who have
increased accidental shootings in their homes. Safety comes from
actual safety. It’s a horror film. “Don’t go in!” Guns are the thing.
And guns are The Thing. It. And It. “The horror, the horror.”
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
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