TEXAS OFFICIALS INCORRECTLY CLAIM A TEACHER LEFT A DOOR PROPPED OPEN, UVALDE 2022

And that’s how the shooter got in.
As if it was her fault, as if it was the rock’s—
tumbled smooth along the river bed
or sharp as flint, fissured and cracked, 
coughed up from when this place was a sea, flecked 
with quartz, flecked with small round fossils, 
little crinoid buttons chipped free
and set on a shelf beside other precious things,
or sheared from a mountaintop, crushed by machines
and left beside a door. Perhaps it was 
the noonday heat, the cool breeze 
up from the water, or rustling through 
the blooming trees, moving toward the building, 
summer almost here flooding the hallway 
the cross draft from a window lifting 
the edges of the papers, sweeping across the desks 
and the small warm bodies in their chairs.

Lisa Rhoades is the author of two full length collections of poetry, The Long Grass (Saint Julian Press, 2020) and Strange Gravity (Bright Hill Press Poetry Award Series, 2004). Currently a pediatric nurse in Manhattan, she lives on Staten Island with her spouse. Individual poems have appeared widely including recently in Calyx, Nimrod, Cider Press Review, and The Southern Review.