Mary Ann Honaker
Trigger
It’s the week after El Paso
and Dayton, Ohio. The grandsons
are here for a visit and my mother
has bought them new Nerf guns.
I’m not judging here– two Christmases
ago I bought them semi-automatic
Nerfs that could fire thirty to fifty
soft foam rounds in one great blaze.
My brother’s house was peppered,
pellets in between couch cushions,
wedged under decorative lamps,
rolled under end tables.
*
When we were kids, we played
the cooler version of Cops and Robbers:
Cops and Drug Dealers.
We had tiny pistols that cracked,
argued over who was now dead,
raced around on bikes
equipped with yellow plastic sirens
bolted tight to the handlebars.
The sirens had three settings:
Police Car, Fire Truck, and Ambulance.
We never used Ambulance;
we never dreamed of aftermath–
*
but now of course kids do.
Kids young as we were then
have known aftermath as a spill
of red from their own bellies.
*
The middle boy immediately
schooled the younger one
on these more complicated,
more life-like guns.
Soon there was an argument.
The ten-year-old strapped
one gun into a shirt waist-tied,
another down the back of his T-shirt,
and held the third, true child warrior
stance. He crept room to room
targeting the four-year-old,
who cried, “Don’t shoot me!”
“But you shot me in the face!”
the older child tattled. Dad tore
the guns from their hands
one by one but not before
the ten-year-old, seething with fury,
pinged a plastic bullet casing
hard on the hardwood floor.
His cry of unfair so loud
we all jumped a little, shocked.
*
Super soakers were the rage
when I was in high school.
There was a summer spate
of super soaker drive-bys,
like real drive-bys except
victims were only surprised, wet,
and sometimes, even, refreshed.
*
After El Paso I refreshed my screen
and watched the death toll rise.
The grandkids– my nephews–
watch hour upon hour
of safe, silly, violence-free
cartoons. But they know
how to jam a cartridge in,
how to rest the butt on a shoulder,
how to pull the trigger.
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of It Will Happen Like This (YesNo Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in 2 Bridges, Drunk Monkeys, Euphony, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Off the Coast, Van Gogh’s Ear, and elsewhere. Honaker holds an MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.
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