W Hillsdale St and Chestnut St, Lansing, MI, April 23, 2026
“A gunman walked up to an intersection near downtown Lansing on the night of Thursday, April 23 and fired into a crowd, sending six people to the hospital with gunshot wounds, police said." —Lansing State Journal, April 24, 2026
by Ron Riekki
“Stay in your lane.” —Common, “The Game”
“the world
is dying/
right now in front of you”
—Dennis Hinrichsen,
“I Had a River Once. Two Friends. This is the City of Dementia.”
Sky lacks stars, I drive up, midnight, wanting to see what it’s like
in these mute soot-colored neighborhoods’ packed scars of late-night
shootings that seem to be so common. I’m in a black car.
I exit, rushing, pull a quick right into a black tar empty lot, sit tight,
headlights hit bright like flame on an unnamed unkempt apartment
complex lit like a mild Wes Anderson noir attempt, almost too exact,
windshield like film frame, the poor building a rich pitch-/kiln-black, except that
one sole light’s on, yellow as all hell, giving this gushing xanthic-like light like
gigantic Atlantic with yellow gushing out of this most bright bright lit room almost dead
center. From limbo, I see a head; a body rises—a living ghost—comes to the window,
stands there, looks at me, unforgiving, I suppose, yes, in his best Wild West anger gunslinger
quick-draw pose, hands close to his sides (never rides sidesaddle). I’d appear, I guess, maybe
like a narc, or a mark, parked in dark shadows, this look on his face like Hell no. I’m alone.
I realize this is his home. I’m coming to these shootings as a poet-reporter, as a quote-recorder,
as I’ve wrote over and over on how guns torture, a sorta post-traumatic press disorder. But this
is simply his home. This poem is an intrusion, my body too, my skin yellow in the streetlight
and I think of yellow journalism, of dirty laundry, of firm boundaries. I feel apologetic.
Diegetic sound of some distant car, distinct, far in the distance, De Palma’s Blow Out-ish.
But this isn’t mishmash of film. He’s not a character. These are people. These mass shootings
are mass killings. They’re real. I feel, for the first time, that I shouldn’t be here. For real. My
wheels peel out, go out the way I came. No quotes captured; no names named; no new insights. Six people were shot here. Daughter, shot here. A 14-year-old girl shot here, in the ear. Five
females shot here. A 5-year-old girl shot in the leg. I imagine that 5-year-old standing in that
window in the night, bleeding, watching me, needing me to do something other than just write.
Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets
Laureate on Social Justice.
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