While Everything Falls Apart, Imagine How You’ll Teach Your Son About Guns

bang, bang, he asks every night, bang, bang,
and you’re dead, wants you to sing in his ear
bang, all the ways we know how to take

each other’s lives and all the tools we’ve made
to help us do it, he forms tiny fists pretending,
already knows his body is enough, bang, bang

and when you take away his neon water gun,
he cries and throws his head back on the pavement,
bang, all the ways we know how to take

things away from children, to give them
back once they know how to really use them,
bang, bang, he asks every night, bang, bang?

outside your window and on the news,
in the small hands of his friends, their mouths,
bang, all the ways we know how to take

their hands and mouths for granted,
you’re dead, a refrain so familiar it fires
soundlessly, bang, bang, every night, he sings
all the ways we know how to take.

This poem was first published by Poets Reading the News

By Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

A poem from Disarm: A Themed issue Responding to Mass Shootings in America

Biography:

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. Julia’s poetry collection, The Many Names for Mother, won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the Fall of 2019. She is also the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and Nashville Review, among others. Julia is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine (www. constructionlitmag.com) and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood (https:// otherwomendonttellyou. wordpress.com/).