Middle-School Halloween Party, 1978
Melissa Balmain

“There have been 19 school shootings this year [in the US] that resulted in injuries or deaths...”
—Education Week, September 2026

“Absolutely no costumes with weapons, including plastic ones. Masks and fake blood are not allowed. Carefully consider the appropriateness of your costume in a school setting.”

—Recent middle-school email to families in suburban New York

We were vampires, ghosts, and devils,

squeaking Nikes on the floor,

vying with the Hulks and Batmen

over who could drip more gore.

Masks and weapons? How we loved them—

cowboys, Jimmy Carters, clowns,

dancing as we downed Doritos,

relishing the night our town’s

ever-mortifying fishbowl

dimmed for once—our parents’ laws

powerless to keep grape soda

from our orthodontic jaws,

powerless to stop our noisy

bouts of gleeful mimicry

while we battled like Darth Vader

or the ChiPs from NBC. . . .

Home in bed, our darkest nightmares

never hinted at the ways

Halloween would free our children
from their ordinary days.

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Melissa’s notes: “This first appeared, in a slightly different form, in The New Verse News.”

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Melissa Balmain edits Light, North America’s longest-running journal of comic verse, and teaches writing at the University of Rochester. Her poems and/or prose have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Ecotone, The Hopkins Review, Lighten Up Online, Literary Matters, McSweeney’s, Mezzo Cammin, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, and Rattle. Her latest book of poetry is Satan Talks to His Therapist (Paul Dry Books).

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Middle-School Halloween Party, 1978 Melissa Balmain

Middle-School Halloween Party, 1978
Melissa Balmain