After Calling My Child’s Principal to Report the Boy Researching Guns on His Computer
By Francesca Bell
I find myself on the floor, surprised to be crying, the way my FBI-agent friend was surprised to find himself shot through the thigh. A bullet travels so fast it can enter and exit your body unnoticed. Fear lives so big in me it can go undetected but comes shaking out. When I speak with the principal, she says thank you, over and over. If you see something, say something, they tell us, and I do. I think she is a very nice woman. Like all the other very nice women, the dead ones and the one in Uvalde who stepped into the hall with the gunman to test if her classroom door was locked. I think of that woman from my floor and quake like a person riven by gunfire. In the video, the gunman has swagger. He is, I would say, of excellent cheer, and his gun sounds like a good American movie. Automatic, semiautomatic— what is the difference among friends and fellow countrymen? The sound of children screaming has been removed from this video. The gunman fires in bursts and then pauses, like a child checking his work. Officers mingle in the halls, like guests at a funeral. The gunmen don’t kill themselves anymore, I’ve noticed. They decline to remove themselves from the video. They ask for rides home. They drop their weapons and surrender. They hide in closets and wait for police to breach the unlocked classroom door. The way my child breached my body then left me forever ajar. The way the gunmen breach with their bullets even those they don’t hit, even the mothers at a great remove from the video, safe on their kitchen floors but crying. And the principals say thank you, thank you for removing the weeping of mothers, for scrubbing the sound of children screaming from the video, for rendering them all silent, as if they are already dead.
Francesca Bell is author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and What Small Sound, and translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She is Poet Laureate of Marin County, Events Coordinator for Marin Poetry Center, Translation Editor at Los Angeles Review, and Arts Program Coordinator for the Friends of the San Quentin Prison Library.
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Wow. Stunning on so many complex levels. As reader, I am both camera and the watched as the poem progresses through its many riveting scenes and reflections. Thank you!
Powerful poem