Jeanne Obbard lives in the Philadelphia suburbs and works as a project manager on oncology trials. Her poetry has appeared most recently in The Briar Cliff Review, Construction, District Lit, and The Moth.




Poets Resist
Edited by Kolleen Carney Hoepfner
May 30, 2018

Jeanne Obbard

I’m coming for your guns

I will fold them up small, in the string-theoried eleventh dimension and I will tuck them away there and you will be sad. I’m coming for your guns, it’s true; I plan to trade them for Lego minifigs. I have one who looks just like Ron Swanson as Duke Silver; you’ll see. I am coming for your guns, all “5 to 10 million” AR-15s, and I aim to turn them in at the local police station where they will origami them one by one down to a wakeful stillness, and the bullets will be pulled apart by an army of Etsy sellers and turned into flowerpots, birdbaths, and earrings. I’m not insensible to the loss you will feel. In the place of guns I will give you dark chocolate, a video of 30-year-old Stevie Nicks singing “Wild Heart,” and lavender crushed in your hands in December, still smelling of thunderous nights with some lover you love to feel the missing of. I will give you the spit of sand that is Pea Island, with the docile sound on one side and the ocean on the other, all to yourself, for hours, and all you hear is the wind washing you kindly emptied. In short, I will give you the whole world of things. Which, if you think about it, you already have. In other words I have nothing to give you. In other words aren’t you already complete? Isn’t all the rest of the gunless, unbloodied cosmos enough?


Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.