☀ Today's Poem: "I want to tell you what poverty gave me--" Melissa Crowe

a life outside capital, though I know it doesn’t
seem to make sense, given my grandfather’s knuckles,
cold-cracked and smelling always of kerosene,
my uncle’s back permanently bent in the shape

it took to lay two decades’ worth of brick.
Or afternoons spent shaking down sofas
and chairs, fingers slid between car seat
and console, seeking coins for a hotdog

at Susan’s Market or a pack of my mama’s
Merit Menthols or to pay the paperboy,
sometimes somebody’s father who needed
the money, too. Maybe the early bus to subsidy

breakfast, first time I saw yogurt, heaping pans
of the stuff, that sweet, pale purple spooned
into its compartment on my tray next to a little
box of some cereal we couldn’t get with vouchers,

Frosted Flakes or Fruity Pebbles, and my choice
of peanut butter gone warm and soft or a single
melted slice of cheese like a slick of cartoon
sunshine on white toast. Fresh delights I paid for

only in shame. And look—a line of rocks plucked
from the nearest ditch showed twelve shades
of earth from gray to pink, and Nana said
the one ringed with a stripe of quartz was a wish—

lucky, like the park with its pondful of tadpoles
or the library’s shelf of mangled pop-up books
nobody could check out but anybody could touch,
flat paper and then—turn the page or pull the tab—

a world. Maybe it was Gram bringing me things
she found in the hotel rooms she cleaned:
transistor radio, abridged copy of Kidnapped,
and once a waist-high bowling trophy, me winning,

no matter whose name was etched in the plate.
Or maybe the way we ran a hot bath only once,
and together my mother and I dulled its sheen
with Ivory suds, our dirt, before my father lowered

himself into the gone-cool water, how this
necessary sharing somehow welcomed me nightly
to the difficult world. Maybe my mother holding
my hand while we, carless, walked through a near-dusk

blizzard from our place on one side of town
to her brother’s in low-income on the other,
so we were swallowed and swallowed as we moved
through undifferentiated space, not knowing

whether the ground beneath us was front yard
or sidewalk or street, and when we arrived
in the warm somewhere of my uncle’s apartment—
which might have been floating in the ocean

or moored on the dark side of the moon, judging
by the blackened windows and the scarcely muted,
cosmic howl of the storm—the local news was on,
and there we were, I swear it, in the weather report,

my mother in her old blue coat, and hidden
under mine, I knew, was a chain of red crochet
she’d made to join my mittens so they wouldn’t
be lost, and if in that vast wildness we were

so tiny we could barely make out the specks
of ourselves, what was this wealth? Practically
fractal, nearly out-of-body. In this moment lifted
from time, we were famous to ourselves, beings

in the world not once, but—look—twice, so who
knew, who knew how many times we could appear
or where? Maybe that was the winter we lived
in a rental without a working refrigerator, cartons

of milk lodged in the snow outside the front door,
the stuff always a little frozen when we drank it,
those crystals too a magic we made because we could,
because we had to. I even ate the snow, in a big bowl

with Kool-Aid, scrappy sub for the Slush Puppies
I’d yearn for come summer, pick bottles to buy.
And here I am talking again about buying things,
but what I hoped you’d see is that so often—

for stretches of days—we didn’t. Couldn’t. Free.