poets respond - i kill

  i submitted this to Rattle, Poets Respond the other week

after the shootings on a kentucky highway

poets respond - Poets Respond® | Rattle: Poetry

I kill

By Mike Hammer

 

 

Squatted in the woods

On a Kentucky roadside

My AR style rifle showers front windshields in on drivers and blows out tires

A man emerges from his car to inspect his tire and I marvel at the tiny hold that appears in the man’s neck, and the huge amount of blood that begins to flow out of it

I did that

I put a new mag in my AR and hit a woman in the arm, she spins and yelps with pain

Her eyes search the horizon for the cause of the pain, the reason

I shoot her in the right eyeball

The eyeball explodes and the eye socket becomes a crater

Her body collapses down in a heap, next to the man who is strewn out on the ground and still trying to stop the blood rushing out of his neck

Now other people from the cars stopped along the highway come to look

There are about a dozen cars I have stopped and more are slowing down, rubberneckin

Concerned

It is the last thing they will be concerned about

2 men I kill with headshots

1 woman I shoot in the calf

As all the other people hustle out of their cars and start to run away I shoot people - like target practice, like killing cattle, like culling a herd,  cause someone has to- in the back of the legs, or the back of the arm, of the back of the head, or in the lower back

The people are now running beyond my range

some fall bout I am not sure if I hit them or where

I spray off a few dozen more bullets then pack my rifle away

I turn and pick up my backpack, full of supplies

And I start my hike into the woods

Leaving those on the highway dead and dying behind me

screaming in pain

Some of their ghosts chase me

As I hike deeper into the woods

The ghosts make a horrid noise and smell and I’m not sure if I can kill them

But I’ma try

 

44779 Street - Ohio Poetry Day poem from Mike Hammer

Mike Hammer's entry for the Small Worlds contest in Ohio Poetry Day 2024

 

44779 Street

 

House. Show. Tonight.

A grand piano

in a tiny living room.

Eye Vree Tickla is on tour.

I am the one humming along.

i was recognized as an Honorable Mention for this poem

i do not usually do form poetry

but this contest was sponsored by my friend, writer Rhonda Baughman

so i chose to enter to support her

the contest guidelines were to enter a 5 line poem that is in the tanka or limerick or cinqain form

i chose the tanka form, and wrote a modified tanka, which is a traditional 5 line Japanese poem, a 'short song'

according to poets.org

the  tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single  unbroken line. A form of waka, Japanese song or verse, tanka translates as “short song,” and is better known in its five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form.