Thank you, Jendi Reiter, for your vivid poem, “No One Asked Why I Wanted the Gun” that unfolds like a series of scenes from a film.
No One Asked Why I Wanted the Gun
by Jendi Reiter
I put on my one non-homosexual tank top
to learn how to shoot a pistol from my pharmacist
in the clubhouse up a gravel road.
Creaking pines and paper targets lazed on the May breeze.
The finches whistled in the hush between percussive echoes.
Don’t call it a weapon, he said,
handing out our navy-blue NRA manuals
about cleaning, aiming, safety and sport.
We host barbecues here. You’ll make friends.
I sat between a butch who farmed psilocybins
and a baker with anime tattoos.
Downtown my family was marching
in the first Pride since we lost the government.
In the clubhouse we learned everything
to do in danger before you say it with gunpowder:
run through the streets, hide in your bedroom,
persuade the badges
you’d done everything right in this story
that ended with a hole.
We shared granola bars and beef jerky before the live-fire exercise.
I was satisfied by the slow learning,
part by part, how to care for something powerful.
When you’re a writer, you don’t get proof,
like a bullet is proof, that you caused anything.
He praised the tight scatter of holes near my bull’s-eye.
Two weeks later, in a windowless room at the station,
a bald white cop asks me, a bald white man
with paperwork concealing my vagina,
to confirm each response on my online application:
No, I have never been admitted to a mental hospital,
voluntarily or otherwise.
All my friends are incest survivors.
Some of them know it.
I suppose they will have to find other ways to defend themselves,
like writing novels.
As for me, since the inauguration
I’ve been having intrusive thoughts about Walter Benjamin.
This is the kind of town where the desk sergeant
might be familiar with the deaths of 20th-century German philosophers.
Fortunately he gives me no occasion to bring that up.
As I exit through the police station lobby,
a bear-shaped stranger in a cannabis ball cap
greets me: “How ya doin’, boss?”
He boasts that he makes good money gambling on his phone.
Buoyed by this male-to-male recognition,
my will to live is restored for another day.
This poem was first published in SHINE Quarterly, Issue #10 (2026).
Jendi Reiter is the author of six poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Introvert Pervert (The Word Works); the novels Two Natures and Origin Story, both from Saddle Road Press; and the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press). Awards include two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships for Poetry and the Rainbow Award for Best Contemporary Gay Fiction. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.