Untitled Xerox Cut-Out (Squeaky Fromme/Gerald Ford) 1993-94

Printed paper with paper clips and

Pencil on paper in artist’s frame

Cady Noland

American, born 1956

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Squeaky said she was serious but also having fun,

adding there wasn’t even a bullet in the chamber,

and that when the cops saw she was aiming a gun

at President Ford, she knew they would arrest her

because, she said, she was doing it to get attention

and not to kill the President, she wasn’t a murderer

even though she was a Manson family member, one

of the first, in fact, when Charlie saw a panhandler

on the street, her, and told her to come, it was done;

and thereafter she was Charlie’s most loyal follower,

and why she became one of the sit-ins: media spun

Charlie as mastermind of the Tate-La Bianca murders

but even Bugliosi said Charlie never killed one person.

She said she pointed at Ford to protest Earth pollution.

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Stephen Gibson Gibson is author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (Able Muse Press 2024), Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press 2016), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title reprint, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams prize finalist, University of Arkansas 2011), and three others.