621: The Wrong Question More Than Once
621: The Wrong Question More Than Once
Transcript
I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.
Just recently a Missouri School Board voted to ban Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and a Tennessee school board banned Maus–the graphic memoir of Art Spiegelman about his own family’s experience in the Holocaust. Book banning infuriates me. We are banning books to keep our children safe, but we can’t pass gun laws to protect our children from school shootings?
In today’s urgent poem, we see the speaker wonder what it might take to value the safety of all children. Let me tell you, it’s not banning books.
The Wrong Question More Than Once
by Matt Donovan
For most of the shift, it was more about not looking bored or wanting to seem invisible behind the ER desk while nothing much happened at all. A Cubs banner twitched in the air vent. A nurse wearing a “Welcome to the Madhouse” T-shirt described a stick-figure meme. Someone wanted to know why a drunken John Doe had pissed in the supply closet & a man half–hidden behind a triage curtain never stopped staring me down. Off-rhythm pings from somewhere chased a pulsing beep that made it seem as if something had gone wrong. I asked & then later asked again: nothing was ever wrong. And because the shift would be ending soon, I asked the question I was there to ask after reading about a surgeon who’d claimed our gun problems could be solved if only we’d release the autopsy photos from Sandy Hook. That’s the only hope, she insisted, for this to be reversed. No doubt even if I’d found a better shape to my words, the doctor chaperoning my visit would have given me the same look that said as an act of mercy to everyone within earshot, please shut the fuck up. The idea seemed stolen from Scared Straight, he said, the 1970s documentary in which prison lifers rage at juvenile delinquents as a means of mending lives. Shoes squeaked. Phones rang. More off-rhythm pings. Besides, why would seeing bodies with gunshot trauma make any difference to Second Amendment fans? They’d say “Yeah, that’s what guns do.” The next day in the basement of Saint Sabina church, talking to the woman from Purpose Over Pain, what easier way to proclaim what little I knew than to ask the same question even after she told me—calmly, quietly—how her son was shot unloading a drum kit outside a church? We have mass shootings all the time in Chicago & they do nothing. It’s a problem when it’s white lives. When a six-year-old gets shot on the South Side, it’s just crime as usual. And after she walked me upstairs through the pews, past the sculpture of an ash–gray figure gripping a pistol with one hand while piercing the chest of a young girl with another, leading me through the locked front doors & out to the display case lining the sidewalk—was I thinking even then about how photos of the dead might enact change? This is our memorial wall, she told me, matter of fact. I knew everyone here. She watched me for a moment scanning the faces stapled in place— school photos, caps & gowns, plenty of thumbs-ups & basketballs, children a few months old—before pointing at a teenager grinning in a white tuxedo in front of a drawing of a skyline & fountain. There’s my Terrell right there.
"The Wrong Question More Than Once" by Matt Donovan, from THE DUG-UP GUN MUSEUM, forthcoming from BOA Editions in November 2022. Used by permission of the poet.