Poverty Cycle

by Anastasia West

My heart is like an starving mime
Painted ghoulish white to cover a barren bottom
Itching for a crumb of something more and somehow
Able to make the unseeable
seen
My heart is like a mime
And it is trying to find a way
Past an imaginary blockage without words, without language,
only long strokes of movement: a gesture, a costume
A mockup of what intimacy is supposed to be.
…
dino nuggets: the white trash caviar
Reeking of elegance and grease, sometimes eaten by a film star
But best consumed by a child lying on the drugget, head back in ease.
The little carnivore, drenched in ketchup
And waiting to develop.
They say they turned into feathered bipeds, that we call them chickens now
Those strip’ed beasts
That roamed the earth

Looking for a feast
Of their own.
Much like the child
Chopping away.
But of course, you can’t expect
A little creature to know of
The ferocity behind the chicken
That they push into their mouth.
Dino into chicken
Chicken into dino,
Full circle.
…
My heart is like an starving mime
Painted ghoulish white to cover a barren bottom
Itching for a crumb of something more and somehow
Able to make the unseeable
seen
My heart is like a mime
And it is trying to find a way
Past an imaginary blockage without words, without language,
only long strokes of movement: a gesture, a costume
A mockup of what intimacy is supposed to be.
…
lustful in the walmart/i never fucked hard enough to make it in the gig economy

but i will love you/almighty dollar daddy/ if you can bruise me. and you can. and you will
its true what they all said before about
money and happiness and happiness and money but money can buy condoms.
So honey
fuck me hard and fast in the parking lot dont care who sees
we’ll make low class love in your beat up toyota: you’ll-
kiss the cellulite in my underthigh. my arms. my elbow.
you’ll
spit in my mouth (something my mother would think is perverted)
while i remember her on her knees
praying for the rent check to go through
when i feel you cum inside of me i’ll think of all the men i sent pictures of my breasts to before i
knew
i could do it for money
…
Big black boots stample
what used to be meadows,
what used to be earth,
But now there is nothing green here
Nothing but the cool grey out in front of you
Big black boots are too much for me, too adult
But this is how we do things here.
We can both feel the blood pooling in our soles
Two midtown stepsisters, Anastasia and Drizella
We Cut our feet to fit the shoe.

Because what else is there to do?
Are you alright? She roars, a smoke breathing dragon in between 42nd and 50th,
The lights
Oh, the lights.
They shine on us,
They try to illuminate me,
But instead I melt.
The ground feels cool and grey.
Like it always does.
Correction: like it always will
Alright? I say, the words trickle out of my mouth like spit on a sidewalk,
Where are we going?
If they looked hard enough, the lights
They could see your skeleton.
They illuminate you down to the bone.
They could burn and braise you.
But not me.
For I have no body, no bones.
Just a pool of liquid on a city street
Business as usual.
Did you know humans were made from ash and stardust? She says, picking up the cool water
of me, tumbling it in her hand
And did you know that we all started up there? Up there? Up there behind the fog?
But she forgets:
There are no stars here,

Just a velvet black sheen of what used to be.
What used to be.
Where are we going? I try to ask, but I end up blowing bubbles.
She laughs.
Anywhere that will let us in, silly.
She drinks from me. Of me. What used to be me. We go on.
Looking for a place to call our own.
Because, what else is there to do?
…
“Do you ever wake up in the morning and feel like one of Saturn’s moons” she said, spinning the
gum around her fingertip
“Not the fancy ones, like Titan or Dione, but the provisional moons
Called after letters and numbers
But not yet christened with a name”
Strong:
Metaphor
I am a tool found via excavation
Strong Steel pushes back piles of polluted old earth
To reveal me.
The sun burns deep when you’ve bene buried for too long.
Rust runs up my ragged blade
Once sharp, now dull.
Glove’d hands pull me from my deep slumber, smile and say,
“They’d been outnumbered”

I was a tomahawk from an ancient civilization
Used to being gawked at, talked at, and of course slaying your enemies.
I don’t stray from the course,
I lay at your bedside table at night waiting waiting waiting
To be of use.
But now
I am an artifact to be stared at in a museum
Started at such a high pedestal
But now the people whisper ‘incredible’
as they eye the skill with which i was crafted
Here, I am looked at and gawked again, but under new pretenses
And it is understood that
I am not useful when locked behind glass