Single Lens Reflex

On July 27, 2008, a man pulled a sawed-off shotgun from a guitar case and fired randomly into a crowded sanctuary during a youth-led worship service at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the Brian Griffin was director of Religious Education programming. The worship service was intended to be a production of the play Annie, Jr. produced by children of the church, under the tutelage of our Director of Music. Instead, just as a child spoke the opening words of the play, a man who hates liberalism opened fire. Two people were fatally wounded and seven others were also shot before church members wrestled the man to the ground, about five seconds after he opened fire. He got off three shots. After he was subdued, there were 73 unfired shotgun shells scattered across the floor. About one-hundred children and teens, many of them in his Religious Education program, witnessed this bloody scene. Some of the children were splattered with blood. One of the dead was the author's close friend who died in Sunday light after shielding others with his body.

Many of the poems attempt to replicate some sense of the immediate horror and dissociation of trauma that that the author experienced as he watched things unfold in real time. Those constitute the first section, "Lens." Others, in the "Mirror" section, are reflections on the event and what it might mean, filtered through his anxiety and traumatic memories. Still others are an exploration of ideas of healing and renewal ("Image") to the extent that he has found such things to be possible.

The author's intent throughout is to reflect honestly on his experience. He wants to approximate, for the reader, how mass murder disconnects and in other ways reconnects its survivors to and from the quotidian. He shows the reader what happened, and to do so in a way that simply telling the story cannot-to guide the reader through a facsimile of trauma. These are not "therapy" poems. These are attempts to share a glimpse into raw, hard horror, and the long struggle that ensues.