The Allure of Murder
The June Hoot began with two wonderful featured readers: Mimi White reading from her new book, The Last Island, and Christine Korfhage reading from her new book, We Aren't Who We Are and this world isn't either. During the open mic portion of the evening, Jon Shutt read this striking poem:
THE ALLURE OF MURDER
Middle Schoolers never hesitate
to ask the questions everyone's thinking.
You were in Iraq. That means you've killed
somebody, right?
Did you shoot anyone?
Have you ever thrown a live
grenade at someone?
Are the terrorists all deformed
and weird looking?
Did you slit anyone's throat?
Did you shoot anyone? Did you kill anyone?
Did you kill anyone? Did you kill!?
When the answers leave my lips,
for some reason —
I wish I were lying.
– Jon Shutt
I like the way Jon uses repetition to not let us escape from the questions. And some of the power of the poem comes I think from the fact that the narrator never tells us how he answered the questions. We know that many veterans are never able or willing to tell their families what war was truly like and exactly what they did and experienced. Like the Middle-Schoolers Jon describes, we have some of the same questions, but we are reluctant to ask them so directly. Are we sparing the ex-soldiers bad memories, or are we afraid to hear the answers?
– Harvey Shepard
(hshepard@gmail.com)
“The Allure of Murder” copyright 2008 by Jon Shutt. Jon Shutt is a full-time teacher and a Guardsman. After having been deployed to Iraq for a year, he has been tirelessly putting that experience on paper.