- Carol Everett Adams
USA After Newtown, Connecticut
"A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can't defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars." Salman Rushdie, May 2022
This poem is only published here.

USA After Newtown, Connecticut
Photo in the newspaper
finally broke through to me—
little girl with the same hat
I’d just bought my 1st grader
at Target. Brown and pink fleece.
Was she wearing it that day?
I had to throw ours out, always thinking
of it that way. Blood on our hands
as we shop at Target. Shopping connects us
closer than the souls of our children.
I think too often of every little
piece of clothing they wore, so many I don’t
know anymore, the number. But their little jeans,
shoes from JCPenney, mass-produced
t-shirts. For every piece they put on their last day,
from the dryer or snatched from a hamper,
for each hat, someone else is a copy,
going on like nothing happened.