Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
 

G Day

Today is G day, my son says to me

the morning after another school shooting

he doesn’t yet know about. The alphabet countdown

has begun to mark the passage of time between

now and the final class when second graders stream

out the guarded door and into summer. We’re learning

about grapes, he says, and as I unknot his hair,

hands shaking, I picture the kids in a criss-cross

circle, eyes closed, each biting excitedly into

a succulent spherical berry before giving language

to the pop: Sweet and tart or like jelly. And there

will certainly be a child who thinks but maybe doesn’t

say, the shape of a bullet, the way his teacher will keep

her terror private, the way I hear in my head, G is for gun.

Alicia Rebecca Myers’s recent poem “Winter Solstice” was selected by Kaveh Akbar for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021, and she was a finalist for december’s 2022 Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Threadcount, FIELD, and The Rumpus. Her chapbook, My Seaborgium (Brain Mill Press), was winner of the inaugural Mineral Point Chapbook Series.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx