Re: Cardboard Sign

for anyone who has ever said people are poor because they’re lazy On any given day in Southern California, coming off any freeway, you’ll see a veteran with a sign reading, “Fallen hero here, needs money or shelter to be considered human again”. Because once society puts ‘homeless’ before ‘person’, equality is measured in dollar signs. Even when the veteran is ‘fallen’ can they still be called a ‘hero’ when that hero is a woman selling oranges on street corners just to keep her children from starving? I was 20 the first time I understood the word ‘starving’. Starving is what happens when God doesn’t hear your mother’s prayers to keep her children from begging. Starving is what happens when your family has only enough money to choice between eating for a day and not being slapped with an eviction notice. Starving is what happens your voice rings out like dry chicken bones rattling in a licked-clean tin can when you and your mother have to go dumpster diving to see your next meal. Starving is your chest reading like a cardboard sign: When you are this hungry every day, the world shifts out of focus. The fridge looks likes a skeleton that hasn’t known its own stomach in years and your body is eating itself backwards just to survive. Because we all just want the chance to survive. My mother and I found refuge in soda cans in beer bottles In whole meals our neighbors tossed because they expired yesterday and but what we really found diving is humanity sometimes does not mean having a salesman smile or being a pressed suit but it lies in the struggle, the will to live every day So some days when a man in a dollar store parking lot, when a man plays me a song on his rusted trumpet, a man in a gas station approaches me for some change I hand it to him and I say, “You are the most human because you are not any less for needing but because you are more for being this brave”.