Soup Kitchen
He says his ma has six kids,
as if he usually tells that to
people who don’t even ask.
Sometimes, the potato slime
doesn’t seem as coarse, less
like pulp and more like a
mash. But when he asked for
it, it looked like gunk: like a
torrent of muck, gushing and
trickling, under broken trees,
under execrating birds. He looked
like an average boy, ten
years old, his pants at his
thighs. He says his ma has
six, six kids, but he didn’t say
that she wasn’t married, that
she had him when she was still
in school, that all she’s seeing,
eyes cocked at six small faces,
is indiscernible, racing pale
potatoes, the crack and weed
images tattooed on her arms and
in her eyes. He says his ma has
six, six kids, and that they’re all
susceptible to a nightly beating,
to a drag of pot, to a life of crime.
If only I was old enough to adopt
six sickly kids, (who are now somewhere
rotting, where? where? where?)
I am a child from a moneyed
family, where the honey flows like
water and the milk pours like rain.
I, in my crumpled apron and gloves,
am a poster boy for suburbity, sobriety
and clean, healthy school grades
and clean, healthy households, from
discipline and control, a white egg
in the middle of rottenness. Six?
Six, when compared to a hundred,
is a miniscule quantity: but for
me, it was infinity, it was implausible,
it was riotous. I scooped the slime
with a plastic spatula, and splat on
his plastic plate, all for a plastic
thank you, and he returned to his
plastic table. Six kids. Six kids. Six kids.
