Little Things or Watch How you Cook Those Eggs

Found Poem #18: Little Things or Watch How you Cook Those Eggs

A man facing eviction
Over his hostile temper
Became enraged
By how his wife
Cooked his eggs

And killed her,
His stepdaughter,
And three neighbors
With a shotgun
In two mobile homes
In rural Eastern Kentucky.

The man, Stanley Neace, 47,
Then went to his home
And shot himself.

Police found his body
On the porch of his trailer.

Kay Rastegar,
Mr. Neace’s landlord,
Said he had begun evicting Mr. Neace
Because he had become
Increasingly hostile toward neighbors.

“He was unpredictable,”
Mr. Rastegar said.
“Little things would set him off.”

Source: The New York Times, September 12, 2010

At Risk or The Case of the Blue Sleeping Pills

Found Poem # 17: At Risk or The Case of the Blue Sleeping Pills

A 4-year-old Brooklyn girl
Who weighed 18 pounds
Was found
DEAD last month

With toxic levels
Of antihistamines in her system,
Her death has been ruled
A homicide.

In a criminal complaint
Filed last month, prosecutors
Outlined a litany of abuse
That they said
The girl, Marcella Pierce, suffered
In her final days
At the hands of her mother.

Ms. Brett-Pierce
Repeatedly
Struck the girl
With a belt and video box
At their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The mother
Lashed the girl to a bed
with twine
And forced her to take
blue sleeping pills,

The complaint added.

A caseworker and a supervisor
In the Brooklyn field office
Of the children’s services agency
Appeared not to have visited the girl
Or her family
For months — despite indications
That she was
At risk.

Source: The New York Times, October 30, 2010