News Brief

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Going about my day, sometimes

I glimpse the news corralled

in the narrow margins

of my bright screen, and often

it depresses me. Like today,

a life reduced to two lines small

enough to cover with my thumb:

Man shoots himself in mall. No one

hurt. How quickly we forget

these strangers as someone—

he didn’t even make it to the end

of the caption.I suppose

this is why it’s called a news brief,

but I don’t have to like it.

Stories blink by fleeting, compact,

and, recalling them later, usually

I get them wrong. It’s all more

or less the same, right? A gun

goes off, then a life—a room

full or the lonely chamber

of a skull—snuffed the way

a light goes off, that sudden,

simple dark—and just now

the news breaks another story, so short

I’ve already learned it by heart.

Visit Leila Chatti at:

https://leilachatti.com/

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To read more of Leila’s poetry, click on the link below:

https://leilachatti.com/poems/

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Read our recent interview with Leila here…

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