A Story About Poverty

She has four children and very little money. She scrapes by. She scrapes money
off of rich people’s toilet bowls, granite countertops, and refrigerator shelves—
sticky with rings from the bottom of Worcestershire sauce and honey.
Who keeps honey in the refrigerator?

Her children frighten her. They have large, hungry mouths. Their hair and nails are always
growing. They need new clothes and shoes. They ask too many questions.

She is not even sure if they are her children. She reaches inside her womb to remember and feels
each of their imprints, like handprints made in wet concrete.

It is night and the house is quiet. The children are sleeping. She closes her eyes.

The youngest child wails. Her high-pitched screams cut into the mother’s skin like fiber glass.
The mother runs into the children’s room. The youngest child is sitting up in her bed, crying
wasps—they swarm the room and sting the mother again and again.

What’s wrong, yells the mother, her hands gripping the screaming child’s shoulders.
The other children are awake now, their eyes are beacons, searching for the cause of the cries.
What’s wrong they ask, echoing the mother. My tooth screams the youngest, my tooth.

The youngest child opens her mouth and a stench shaped like a ghost comes flying out.
The tooth is pulsating decay. The mother thinks about money. How much money
will it cost to pull the tooth?

With pliers, she pulls out the youngest child’s tooth.

There is so much blood and screaming; and all of the children
are afraid and wonder where their mother has gone. She is swollen with wasp stings.

Liza Sparks was a semifinalist for Button Poetry's Chapbook Contest in 2018. Her work has appeared with Repave, bozalta collective, Cosmonauts Avenue, and many others. She is a brown, multiracial/multiethnic, bisexual woman living and working in Colorado.