What Was Left Out
was the skirt my sister bought with the prize money
she’d won for having suffered exactly enough
when we were children, meaning not so much that it would stop her
from making salutatorian, our faces blurred together
in the news photo above an article in which no one had told us
they’d be outing our family for buying milk at the corner store
with food stamps. The journalist needed her as a testimony
to the power of free government-subsidized daycare, which would have
made a good story to have lived much less told
if our mother had had a job to begin with to go to during the day
or if she’d had enough energy to change
the grimy sheets by first getting out of them, so
I guess you could say we had to learn to make our beds
and sleep in them and then just leave
for college. That’s when she left out the skirt that fit us both and said
I could have it. If I’d been younger it would have been a hand-me-down
but if my sister wouldn’t wear it anymore
then I would wear it. She was over it
and I wasn’t, or she wasn’t and I was—see that
confusion—hiding in that house all those years.
