Editor's Choice
When I was young, we took our crumbs and tried to build a cake.
The bags of chips were labeled “chips,” the cheese was “cheese”—no brand.
No brand for crumb people.
We were shown rich feasts.
“It’s normal,” the TV said, “to eat like this.”
Scraping our plastic plates clean, we were angry and ashamed,
like we had stunted our own growth, on purpose, to
fit under the table and beg crumbs from
plates that always seemed full, china
plates with enough scraps to build miles of cake
that was put behind walls, guarded and barb-wired.
“This is ours,” said the Table People. “Our parents earned it
by paying as few crumbs as possible to parents like yours.
You people are bad with crumbs.”
No pride for crumb people.
Seeing our plight, bakers sought us out
over radio and in our mail, saying
“We lend loaves at great rates, just a loaf
and a quarter—but that’s much, much later.”
We borrowed their bread and promised to pay it
back with our crumbs. We made do
with bread, feasting humbly and only in winter.
But the loaves that we owed soon outnumbered the crumbs we acquired.
More loaves were borrowed to pay for doctors and light,
loaves for repairs on the machines that took
us to the tables where we gathered our crumbs.
Loaves were borrowed from bakers to pay back other bakers,
until they said “no more feasting for you.
If you were better with crumbs, you would have steak by now.”
And then the bakers resumed work on Table People’s cakes.
No feasting at all for crumb people.
We swore on the crumbs of the future until we swore that we had no more crumbs.
There had never been a chance to build a cake for ourselves.
No cake for crumb people.
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