The thing about being poor is that you spend your days pointing

in quiet humor

noting every motherless origin

every gap in the moral fortitude

of the wealthy

you know a coat

is never just a coat

but dead & fresh

Animals stripped & bled

all affirmations of our curational pieties

our inhumanities bold and bighearted by the casual

pleasures of warmth

It’s in the kill that we see

how poverty precludes the conceit of envy.

In the fog of my first tunneled spiral

I saw the drug of that magic

that blade in the shoulder of grace

That cold floor a galley of small stars

I learned the artifice of

Falling

and gravity is

but a single tiny hand

of compulsive insignificance

There I was, welled in tar and fat and

Committed to this violently brave

Sport, a girl unusual and generously unashamed

My face still freckled with the glee

of bare stripped winters me and my ego pretending

bringing us down into a two-footed spill

Demeter and her crops in rot

What even am I except a perpetual resident

Of cold endings

The knee snaps and that was that

“But, did you do it?

Are you sorry?”

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