Pamela Sumners
Talk Radio Visits the Discount Store
Poor people are just like us except that
they suck more, you know, littering our
highways with their clunker cars and
changing their motor oil in the public lot
of their piteous discontents.
They infest scrubbed malls, just gawking
their desire—they’re undoubtedly
only there to lift purloined wares
and shove envy in the empty
wrapper to fool us paying dupes.
Just like they steal from everyone’s
favorite old uncle. The poor!
They lavish clipped coupons in store
lines, and their Kool-Aid-stained children all
are louder, more nervous than mine.
They breathe up oxygen that we
could all put to better use huffing
rarefied radio ether
telling us what to do with them.
They buy the deranged week-old fruit
in “manager’s special” bins and
then these broods just get sick again,
spreading it to the rest of us.
Poor people have opinions
They didn’t pay one red cent for.
Well, as the saying goes, you get
what you pay for and are there not
workhouses for those sort of folks,
those others who used to wash our
clothes and now tick up items
on registers of subtle rot?
They have the gall to smile in lines
at their gridlock clogs of food stamps,
wafting miasma into our
hard-earned air, thankless but smiling,
these dirty change-counting others
holding up the lane for special
processing, coupons, an extra
apple running five cents over ration,
while you’re trying to buy passion fruit,
this subspecies God calls brother.
Pamela Sumners is a constitutional and civil rights lawyer. Her work has been published or recognized by over 20 journals and publishing houses in 2018. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Halcyone/Black Mountain Press volume, 64 Best Poets of 2018. She lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and three rescue dogs.
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