Today's poem is by David Moolten

AR-15
       

He crouches clutching one, gets a bead on me
in Sporting Goods but really his friend behind.
I smile like a good sport though he's not
in SEAL Team 6 and I have a weakness

for diplomacy and deer, feel guilty as his mom
delivers the gospel according to the sane
with just her eyes like mine when I was eight
and she almost didn't let me go

help my friend defend himself with BBs
from bottles, the moon. "You won't hurt anyone?"
The blanks on the page would like to know,
"Are you a fugitive...? Have you ever been

committed...?" I squinted one-eyed and was
an expert like the general who witnessed
to families, "The Lord is a warrior...and I believe...
that sword he'll be carrying when he comes back

is an AR-15." Skeptics claim the reports,
so many they blur together, must be fake,
a conspiracy, want the school's children dug up,
their brief season a heart-rending clearing

they own like deer. "It happened so fast"
we say year after year in America,
which forbids nothing, has everything,
like a department store for grief and slacks.

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Copyright © 2024 David Moolten All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission