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# From: The Target Poems
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/from-the-target-poems/
- Published: 2022-05-05T14:55:47.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-03T18:53:30.000Z
- Author: Staff
- Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59

*by Meredith Mason*

$34.99 blinks across the screen  
and the customer shakes her head,  
*My daughter wants this doll* 
*that will spy on her! Can you believe it?*

When I’m at this job, I put  
my Self on the Shelf. Sometimes  
she watches. Sometimes  
she shuts her eyes.

\~

Alone with my thoughts  
in my register stall, I muse  
about Voldemort  
and his horcruxes, bits of his soul  
he placed in things. Christmas Eve morning  
I spend at the temple of stuff, hoisting  
and heaving, shifting and lifting  
and gently wrapping and reshelving  
and straightening and hanging up.  
That evening I convince my kids  
into little vests and we go  
to the Episcopal Church where  
only my dad is a member.  
We are not baptized, so the priest  
will not plunk a square of bread  
into our cupped hands, but we can  
get a blessing. When the priest  
lifts his hand over my son,  
my son doesn’t know what he’s doing,  
he reaches up to give him five,  
and the priest bows his head like  
this is a funny and also a wonderful thing,  
to be confused and connected,  
together, today. And when I pass under his hand  
—the span of a breath—  
how lucky I feel when he gives me nothing.

\~

I take a bath and put my head  
all the way under so my heartbeat  
is loud and faceted, like  
my children’s heartbeats galloping  
from the ultrasound speakers.  
If one of my sons one day  
has a soul-sucking job,  
I will tell him he can’t quit,  
and he will quit,  
and it will be the start  
of a distance that grows between us,  
a time I didn’t know his heart.