2022

Image Credit: Jeffrey Hamilton

As a child of the 1990s, I’ve lived long enough to remotely bear witness to dozens of mass shootings — hours of footage featuring terrified school children, worshippers, shoppers, massage therapists, theater-goers — it seems everyone is a target here, or at least in danger of becoming one, but it wasn’t until 2022 — until Uvalde, and the resulting lack of legislative action from politicians — that I realized how dissociated Americans have become out of sheer necessity; because while I can’t speak for all of us, I know the weight of these bodies, these lives cut short, would bury me alive if I let them.

“2022” appears in Liz’s chapbook: Leaving the House Unlocked, which was published in the spring of 2023 by Etchings Press at the University of Indianapolis.