by David Armand
Most of my childhood I lived in a singlewide trailer,
which was in the middle of a clearing in the woods
just north of a little town in Folsom, Louisiana.
But it wasn’t even a town. It was a village,
and everyone there was just as poor as we were.
Or they were worse off: broken appliances in their yards,
no electricity, plywood walls, tin roofs,
cinderblock steps leading up to a sagging porch littered
with chickens and mangy dogs and piles of damp newspapers.
But at least I slept on a rickety bunkbed in a tiny room I shared
with my brother.
We didn’t have a car, or when we did,
it barely ran. Once we had this maroon Chevy
with no A/C and you had to punch the steering wheel
to turn the windshield wipers on.
When it rained,
we draped a towel over the open window
so we could still get air.
But I wouldn’t say
my life was bad. We were just poor, that’s all.
So when I grew up, and still struggled, worked
two or three jobs when my kids were little,
it all seemed normal:
taking a roll of toilet paper
from the bathroom at work, pawning a shotgun
for twenty-four dollars to get milk and bread
from Walmart. Waiting in line for food stamps.
But what is life if not an endless juggling of debts,
figuring out which ones to pay off first,
which ones you can skip that month,
and wondering if all the work you do
is ever going to amount to anything?
But it does. I tell myself it does,
and so I wake up every morning,
doing the same thing again and again,
knowing that the trailer I lived in,
and the broken car we had, the piles of bills,
are all buried under years of weeds
and trees and vines. And hope. Yeah, that too.
And this: keep hitting your fist against the steering wheel
if you have to. Until the wipers come on, clearing off the rain
so you can see. The road will keep being there either way.