I Never Figured How to Get Free

Donika Kelly

The war was all over my hands.
I held the war and I watched them
die in high-definition. I could watch

anyone die, but I looked away. Still,
I wore the war on my back. I put it
on every morning. I walked the dogs

and they too wore the war. The sky
overhead was clear or it was cloudy
or it rained or it snowed, and I was rarely

afraid of what would fall from it. I worried
about what to do with my car, or how
much I could send my great-aunt this month

and the next. I ate my hamburger, I ate
my pizza, I ate a salad or lentil soup,
and this too was the war.

At times I was able to forget that I
was on the wrong side of the war,
my money and my typing and sleeping

sound at night. I never learned how
to get free. I never learned how
not to have anyone’s blood

on my own soft hands.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Lynn Melnick

You can only hear you look like a hooker so many times
before you become one. Spandex was really big

the year I stopped believing.
I babysat for the rabbi’s son, Isaac. There was luxe carpet

in every room of the condo. Isaac liked Legos
and we made a pasture and a patriarch and lots of wives.

In his car in his garage the rabbi handed me a self-help book
and put my hand on his crotch, ready to go.

I didn’t care.
I made good money.

Isaac lived to be 180 according to the bible.
Isaac is the only patriarch who didn’t have concubines.

Isaac is 30 now. Modern scholarship tells us

the patriarchs never existed. Experience taught me
the patriarchs are all we’ve got.

All Money Is A Matter of Belief

Carmen Giménez

Adam Smith

Every poet glistens with the dew

of money, but surely only some of them

truly have it. Never enough, wanting to know

what enough felt like, I buy fake versions

of the things I want on credit, my shelves

laden with zirconia, Prada knockoffs, and

pirated Oscar screeners. I’m driven by envy,

and gluttony, the desire to consume better

than anyone else, but the pleasure is only half

of what it should be, and so on until my house

is filled with objects that belong to Chase

and AmEx. I’ve been relentless and I’ve been

lucky, but that’s never been enough.

I’d sell my soul, but there aren’t any takers.

An Inheritance

Naomi Replansky

1918 –

2023

Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,

One, and none, and what do we do?”

This is the worry that never got said

But ran so often in my mother's head

And showed so plain in my father's frown

That to us kids it drifted down.

It drifted down like soot, like snow,

In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.

I shook it off with a shake of the head.

I bounced my ball, I ate warm bread,

I skated down the steepest hill.

But I must have listened, against my will:

When the wind blows wrong, I can hear it today.

Then my mother's worry stops all play

And, as if in its rightful place,

My father's frown divides my face.

Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Replansky. “An Inheritance” originally appeared in The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Market Day

Katy Lederer

It was the market day
and I had rented a stile
by which I could number my patrons;
and a tree, so that I could plant something
living by my selling stand;
and a hefty snatch of my favorite black cloth
so that I could mimic mourning
and people might think that my husband had died
(which he had not).

But knowing that patrons
offered more money to women in black,
I pretended as such and left some of the coins
buried after I had packed up my stand.
I supposed that burying them
might make up for my pretending.
I had also to uproot the tree
and then take it back to my brother-in-law,
so there was already a great gaping hole in the ground.

money

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