I don’t know that I am brave
enough    today   to live   because
to live means to hurt, hurt drums
through my bones     over and over
for the people who died      haloed in
their own blood   because they were
different, special        because someone
devoured life in a shower of bullets
under a black sky        I don’t have
the time to mourn them. Each face, each life
lost before another round, another someone
showers life out of friends
I’ll never meet.      I am not brave enough to live
through another death.

APRIL JONES is the Fiction Editor of Drunk Monkeys. She received her M.F.A. from Antioch University and her B.S. from Brigham Young University-Idaho. Her works have appeared in The Boston Poetry Magazine and Fast Forward Fiction.