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. 

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