Glass: A Journal of Poetry Volume One Issue Three
Canned Tuna
In the photo he is seven or eight.
Twine cinches his pants to his waist.
His hair slicked back, he is smiling
as if he wants the camera to like him
but isn't sure it will. I do not know
whether this was before or after
he smoked his grandfather's cigars
behind the oak tree and thought
no one knew why he was sick and pale.
So little, they called him flea, and every time
they sent him to the butcher shop he got pork chops
no matter what he'd been told to get—so they called him
pork chop, too. And the clothes came down
brother to sister to brother and each year
a pair of catalog shoes that sometimes fit.
Does it matter that canned salmon was cheap
when he was a boy. It was what you ate, night after night
when the butcher cut off credit but the grocer
kept you going—that, beans, out of season venison,
whatever was left from the summer canning.
Such differences are obvious, but they were then
as much the ordinary as the canned tuna on toast
the end of the month when I was a boy—not signs
of making do. What was. That's the trick—to read
what was.