The New Yorker, October 16, 2017, by Patty Mosco Holloway

One Day in a Nation of Guns, New Yorker cover, by David Plunkert (USA). 2017.

The New Yorker, October 16, 2017

The magazine arrived, its cover red.
Black bullets, more than fifty, stained the page.
White letters in the blackness named the dead,
trapped concert-goers killed in one man's rage.
I'd hoped the shapes were pens, instead, inscribed
with writers' names. But I could find no Mead,
Aviv, no Remnick, Owen, Lane, or Wright.
Perhaps they're nukes, Jong-un's, for us to read
the names of U.S. cities in his sights:
D.C., L.A., Chicago, Arlington? 
Not pens, not nukes.  These bullets shrieked the cries
of grieving father, daughter, mother, son
for Jordyn, Jack, Michelle, Christiana, Steve,
Melissa, Derrick, Thomas, Brett, Dorene....

Patty Mosco Holloway

Patty Mosco Holloway grew up on a farm, a "truck garden," which her Italian immigrant grandparents planted in Pueblo, Colorado.  She has taught writing in several Colorado schools and has especially enjoyed  establishing a number of student literary magazines over the course of her teaching career:  Poetrees at Community College of Denver; Visions at Holy Cross Abbey in Canon City,  The Road Not Taken at Fruita Monument High School, and The Write Issue at Douglas County High School in Castle Rock.  Two of her recent poems have been published online in the New Verse News:  "How to Remove Confederate Statues" and "Not Wanting to Talk Politics with the Check-Out Guy."