THE THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS OF TRADER JOE SHOPPERS

by Kristin Berger

Image source: Kim's Cravings

That tonight will be the quiet, easy Sunday when all cars obey
the lights and the moon escorts clouds to the other side
of the overpass, under which homeless families are thankful
for no rain and church tips—
That tonight you reduce the odds and leave the children home,
the one fuming that you won't let him get the Nerf gun
that handles & loads like a semi-automatic;
Because you are the mother, and tonight will be the random night
you return with a trunk full of groceries, nothing
but a split nail and no sirens in the distance.

Kristin Berger is the author of the poetry collection How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a poetry chapbook For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and co-edited VoiceCatcher 6: Portland/Vancouver Area Women Writers and Artists (2011). Her long prose-poem, Changing Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth, was a finalist for the 2016 Newfound Prose Prize. Her most recent work has been published in Contrary Magazine, Half-Mystic Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Timberline Review and Wildness. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she hosts a summer poetry reading series at her neighborhood farmers market. 

MY THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS GO OUT TO YOU

by Melissa Balmain

Well, of course your mom was precious and I'm sad she's not alive, 

but the answer's not to confiscate my HK MP5—

it's to hand all moms their own! You'd still be Mama's honeybun

if, instead of brunch on Mother's Day, you'd thought to give a gun,

give a gun, give a gun, give a love-your-mama gun.

As for spouses, yours was beautiful before her head blew off—

how I wish you'd bought yourselves a his-and-hers Kalashnikov,

and avoided parties, films and other useless couples' fun.

Friday night's for weapons training, it's a chance to date a gun,

date a gun, date a gun, date a hot-o-matic gun.

And your little boy? Adorable—a shame he couldn't bolt.

He's our proof that every teacher ought to have the latest Colt,

plus a practice range where tire swings and tetherballs once spun.

Skip those silly games at recess till each Teach can aim a gun,

aim a gun, aim a gun, aim a Core-required gun.

So come on, quit being haters, don't you give my rights a shove.

There's a way for me to keep my gun, and you the folks you love!

All it takes is recognition that your highest goal, bar none,

is to plan your daily lives around my need to own a gun

that is deadlier than any used from Vicksburg to Verdun,

while ensuring that this right belongs to nearly everyone,

even online-shopping crazies who buy rifles by the ton.

Love my gun, love my gun—you're the planets, it's the sun—

Love my gun, love my gun: if you don't, you'd better run.


Melissa Balmain's poems have appeared in such places as American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Poetry Daily, and The Washington Post's Style Invitational; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. She's the author of Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award).