The explosion at a Glock Plant in Georgia

Dedicated to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Tucson, Arizona

Left one man dead, though he arrived at Grady Hospital,

“in critical condition,” another man in “satisfactory,”

according to the spokesman, and a woman, unhurt

though dazed, like the witness to a sniper’s spree

awake for everything; it is most likely she

who will develop “post-traumatic stress”

so much later than one might ever guess —

But after the explosion’s hour on Yahoo!

all news of it vanished into the ether.

Only the Augusta Chronicle wrote it up,

while the Michigan Shooter never asked:

When an explosion takes out a gun plant,

how many lives are saved?

Instead, the magazine laments

the airlines’ lack of armed pilots

and crows that a bill to ban assault rifles

would slowly be left to die — as it did.

What was the name of the man

who died that day, in the Glock plant?

I scour the web for more news of this explosion,

and finding none, news of explosions at other gun plants,

all the thousands of them, the glimmering origins

of somebody’s death, functioning and whole.

In other news: in California, the dough-muscled

Austro-American Action Star turned governor

campaigns against automatic weapons

as though he had never seen a single one of his films,

or maybe, having seen them to the point of nausea,

devoted his political life to repentance.

The Glock plant in Georgia is gone, or maybe it’s

been rebuilt and enlarged, joining its fellow plants

for whose music some must suffer a lacerated bowel

or undergo surgery to lift a shattered bit of skull

or spend weeks under fluorescent lights

as a trauma counselor attempts

to restore her sanity, her voice.

Image courtesy of © 2011 Thinkstock