Status Updates From Familial Hungers: Poems

Memory is a fickle mistress--crossing
her upends one's whole
existence

no way to earn the right
to live. Just a daily attempt to stretch a dollar
far enough to keep chasing a vanishing hope
that tomorrow might be easier. You know
others think you're stretching their patience--
milking it dry--when you haggle over a handful of t-shirts,
doing what you can to appeal to the milk
of human kindness, having bartered away
your pride. There's no use,
you can't outgrow
the animal they see in you

A country where I've
never lived, reduced
to a single aisle at the grocery store.