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Poetry

I Am Buying The Coffee Too

Harvey Lee
issue four

The violence is getting closer 
to home, I hear a woman
say while we wait in blistering
heat for overpriced coffee.
She is reacting to the news:
eleven stabbed in our state’s
nicest small town Walmart. I wonder 
how she missed the post on our
beloved city’s Reddit:
“I heard seventeen gun shots,” and
“The police could not respond
in time.” Does she know that the 
carnage has been upon our
door ebbing and flowing for
a lifetime? That we are waiting
to waste our money and not ten 
miles north a child lives their life 
in a war zone, in our backyard.
And because it does not make the 
news, and because only the
people who care will spread the word, 
and because those who do not will
Telephone the story to
twisted meaning, and because
those who decide whose blood makes headlines 
will pretend not to notice,
we’ll only clutch our pearls in
this gilded land when the tragedies 
are a black mark upon our finer 
Walmarts.