PAD Day 21: A Lesson in Luck and Consumerism

Today's dual prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) pick any object, make it the title of your poem, and write a poem about it, and (2) write a poem that incorporates something overheard in conversation. I worked all day off and on with this one, and it's still more narrative than I would like it to be, but here it is in its current draft.

Game Card

“No, I don’t play that game,” says the woman

in front of me at the supermarket checkout line.

I tell the cashier that I do, and she hands me

two cards for their sweepstakes, one for me

and one for the woman who declined.

The top prize is a million bucks, but so far

I haven’t won anything, despite bringing dozens

of them home in the last two months.

The first card nets me nothing - no prize,

which is no surprise. I tear the second one open,

folding down the side tabs to make it easier

to rip the perforations, then pulling it apart

so it opens like a booklet. The left side is

a fifty-cent coupon - no big deal. The right side has,

as usual, four little game pieces that I must also

tear apart and paste to a game board that looks like

a Monopoly game, to see if any combination of them

wins a prize. And they do.

I don't know if this is the card that would have gone

to the woman in front of me, but I would like

to thank her for not playing, and thank the store too,

for this wonderful gift.  I'm the proud winner

of a gift certificate to the supermarket.

It's not the grand prize, but it gives me a sense

of accomplishment. After all these weeks of playing,

after all the pieces I’ve collected and glued to the board,

after all those shopping trips and thousands of dollars’

worth of groceries, I have finally, finally, won –

five bucks.