Poem by Sherrell Wigal

Serve Rice in Everything
 
Poor, fuels the imagination,
allows us to make 5 children believe,
popcorn for dinner, 3 nights in a row, is a treat.
 
Hard-up pushes my sister to learn
15 ways to fix potatoes, and that
adding rice in everything makes it go further.
 
Broke drives a single mother’s
$40.00 car, which runs on gas
by the gallon and daily silent prayers.
 
Bad-off demands a space heater in only 1 room,
an open gas oven with nothing baking,
tattered quilts over multiple sleepers.
 
Penniless lives on the street corner hosting
the Viet Nam veteran, the crack addict, and the
lost one with a cardboard carton house.
 
Down-and-out dwells in an un-insulated, rented house
with mold so bad the cabinets can’t be used
and the shower cleaned before anyone gets in.
 
Poverty walks beside the woman with dreams
as rundown as the heels of her white,
$6.00 flats, sloshing through November sleet.

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Sherrell Runnion Wigal is a West Virginia, poet.  Her writing appears in many publications throughout the country, including, most recently, in Streetlight Magazine (Virginia), Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel (Kentucky), and Women of Appalachia Speak (Ohio).

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