Patricia Mona Eng: “My poem responds to the Atlanta-area shootings. I included a first person description of the shooter Robert Aaron Long that includes some of his online quotes juxtaposed against the heartbreaking 911 transcript of one of the Asian women calling for help during the shooting at Gold Spa. I was struck by the relatively detailed and sympathetic descriptions of Long in the press and by the police, and by the lack of information about the Asian women who were killed. There were plenty of quotes from Long and his supporters to be found online but at the time of my writing the poem and this letter, the six Asian women who were killed had not been described in any detail. Being an Asian American woman, I was horrified by the shootings and how investigators seemed to take Long’s denial of any racial motivation at face value. I incorporated the words of Captain Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office that described the killer as being ‘fed up’ and having had ‘a really bad day’ into the poem.”
