Growing up poor taught me there’s a lot
you can do with five pounds of free
government American cheese—
put it on Ritz crackers and saltines;
melt it on minute steaks, eggs, macaroni,
baked potatoes; melt it into cheese dip,
roll it into balls; chop it into cubes;
slap it between pieces of Stroehmann’s
smeared with free government butter
and grill it on the stove. It taught me
you can prop a window open
in summer with the cardboard boxes
the cheese and butter came in,
that a kid can stack those boxes
into a sweet-ass fort for his toy soldiers.
Growing up poor taught me at twelve
how to take a faucet apart
and figure out how to stop a leak.
It taught me that people with the least
money, like my mom, are often the best cooks,
making meatloaf wrapped in bacon
that will melt on your tongue,
bringing buckets of potato salad
to neighborhood barbeques by request.
It taught me how to steal toys
my mom couldn’t afford, taught me
how neatly Star Wars action figures
could slide into the inside rip of a coat.
It taught me that recycling starts at home
when jelly jars became glasses,
foil got washed and used again,
kids’ clothes flowed from house
to house to house like hot gossip.
It taught me, long before Baldwin,
how expensive it is to be poor,
taught me what late fees do to mothers,
that some people go to work
every day to turn off other people’s water
and gas and that there’s a huge fee
to get them turned back on.
Taught me that “buying in bulk”
is out of the realm of possibility
for large chunks of our population
and is a phrase never uttered
in many American homes.
It taught me that once you’ve held
food stamps, you’re always holding them—
blank-faced Jefferson on the five,
blue-inked Lincoln on the soon-gone
twenty—even if, as an adult,
you’re clutching a thousand bucks.
It taught me to switch off lights
when I leave a room, turn down
the heat at bedtime and crawl
under comforters. It taught me
that yes, some people bleed the system—
that some people, like my cousin
and his girlfriend, have more babies
just to get themselves a raise
from the government so they can
buy more drugs—and that those
people make everyone who needs help
for a minute look crooked and lazy,
which they’re not. It taught me
that politicians like to hold up
pictures of zombie-faced huffers
like my cousin outside social service
agencies so they can gut vital programs
then scuba dive off Jeff Bezos’s yacht.
It taught me how to take a punch
to the jaw, a kick to the balls,
how to take a bat across my back
and keep going. It taught me that
Stallone’s Rocky 6 soliloquy—
It ain’t about how hard you hit.
It’s about how hard you can get hit
and keep moving forward
isn’t just cheese, it’s truth.
It taught me, before I heard
Lucille Clifton say it,
to put my one hand inside
my other hand when I had
no one and tell myself I got you.
It taught me song lyrics
can be poetry when Springsteen
and The Clash and KRS-One
and Kool Moe Dee gave me,
through their words and fierceness,
the blueprint for breaking out,
waking something pissed off
and scared within my core.
It taught me to find a job
where I could use my mind
because I saw every man
I grew up around worked
with their bodies until
those bodies failed them
and left them with no pension
or savings, just anger and sadness
pressing down on them
through a thick cloud of cigarette
smoke until they died.
It taught me that much of life
is luck and that I was lucky
to make it out. Lucky, too,
to have been poor, to come from
decent, broke, and broken people
who were smarter than I am,
funnier, and better-looking,
who’d be all too happy to remind
me that I’m nothing special
and that I should thank
my lucky frickin’ stars every day
for stepping in whatever pile
of dog shit that let me find
a different path for myself,
which, believe me, I do.