Drive-By Shooting
Drive-By Shooting
by Lois Harrod
Here no one
remembers
the bicycle
screaming in the rain
or the balloon
opening his throat
to the window
blinds.
No white tape
or chalk traces
the star fruit
spread-eagled.
Four hours later
the children mimic
the unafraid.
Lois Marie Harrod won the Tennessee Chapbook Prize 2012 (Poems& Plays) with her manuscript The Only Is, and her book Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis will be published by Cherry Grove in 2013. Her 11th book Brief Term: Poems About Teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press (2011), and her chapbook Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook contest (Iowa State University). Her Furniture won the 2008 Grayson Press Poetry Prize. Previous publications include the chapbook Firmament (2007); the chapbook Put Your Sorry Side Out (2005); Spelling the World Backwards (2000); the chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999); Part of the Deeper Sea (1997); the chapbook Green Snake Riding (l994), Crazy Alice (l991) Every Twinge a Verdict (l987). She won her third poetry fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts in 2003. Over 600 of her poems have been published online and in print journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Verse Daily and Zone 3. A Geraldine R. Dodge poet and former high school teacher, she teaches Creative Writing as an adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey. Read her work on www.loismarieharrod.com.