Rise Up Review
Bump Stock
1.
There is a name for never having to stop,
freeing semi to be full auto fire. As sardonic as ancient
warriors counting the defeated by their severed hands,
piling the bluffs of the Lower dust of say, Memphis-
the victorious overseer’s mind already off the synecdoche
of lofted palms, linked fingers scorpion tails
to thoughts of upgrades: flint arrowheads to brass, a faster chariot.
2.
The day after Vegas, they called it madness, a lone trigger-
man the evil, & bought more guns. Mammon feasted
Moloch. What happens to the names when we count the bodies?
Does the Bataclan become the Reina become the Strip’s Harvest
become what will become of the country we can’t see beneath
the shroud of policy, prayer’s smoking offerings
a god cannot want & the dead have no use for.
—Max Heinegg
Max Heinegg's poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. He has been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, December Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Cutthroat, Rougarou, and the Nazim Hikmet prize, and his poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Glass (Poets Resist), Tar River Poetry, Free State Review, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He is a singer-songwriter and recording artist whose records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com. He lives and teaches English in the public schools of Medford, MA.
