Empty Pantry Blues
The fifteenth always came at us like a slow wall grinding through the week we faced,
the money already spent before the paycheck had the time to make its place.
Mama counted quarters at the kitchen table with her back turned perfectly straight and thin,
while we pretended we were not hungry and we all learned how to hold it in.
Saltine crackers and a can of beans divided carefully into four every single night,
your brother got a little extra portion because he needed that much to be right.
She would say we are not poor son we are just running a little lean this week,
but I watched the way she looked at each of us and understood what she could not speak.
I grew up knowing which days the food bank opened its side door wide,
and I learned to walk in sideways so nobody from school could catch me inside.
Learned to tell the teacher I had already eaten before I came to class each morning there,
learned that hunger is a private wound you carry with a practiced neutral air.
There is a shame that settles into the body of a child who does not have enough to eat and know,
that no adult income or career or title can fully address or make it go.
It sits behind the sternum like a stone that knows exactly what it weighs and what it is,
a permanent reminder pressed into the muscle of everything that was and is.
Daddy worked the county plant for seventeen consecutive years of his working life spent there,
and still came home most nights with barely enough to keep us from the bare.
Some weeks the lights would cut entirely and we would do our homework by the window light,
I assumed that was just how everyone lived until I got old enough to see it right.
The thing about growing up hungry is it reshapes the architecture of how you think and feel,
it makes the world contract in ways that do not fully open past the ordeal.
You learn to be cautious with your appetite in every room you step inside and enter,
you learn to read the table and the room before you arrive at the center.
My mother canned whatever was in season every year just to get us through into the next spring,
she had a system for the pantry that was almost a professional-grade kind of thing.
I helped her in the kitchen on those long afternoons and learned the math of stretch and save,
how many jars to last how many weeks how much to keep from the grave.
You do not stop being the child who counted crackers just because you grew and earned,
you do not stop the math just because the circumstances have turned.
You carry the empty pantry in the body as a permanent archive and a weight,
a knowledge of what scarcity feels like from inside that you do not translate.
Now I am grown and I make enough that I do not have to go without at all tonight,
but I still check the refrigerator twice before I walk down the hall to the light.
Still feel a clench behind my ribs when the account drops anywhere near to low,
still wake at three in the morning from the same dream I used to know.
I am seven and I am standing at the door and someone is asking me straight why,
why I look so thin and hollow and what exactly I am waiting to reply.
I open up my mouth to answer but the words dissolve away to air,
just the echo of a hunger that was placed in me and left right there.