Aight

Pants sagging low

Skirts riding high

Speaking broken English

Learned in a broken home

Headed by a woman who's had too many children too soon

Expecting others to feed them

While chasing the next high with a cancer stick dangling from the lip

Not the man rising long before the sun

Kissing his woman goodbye before walking out the door

To work at a job that defines him while saying nothing about who he is

Hustling on the side to keep the electric on another month

Not the woman who's made her children the center of her world

Cooking, cleaning, sewing and working

Helping with homework

Teaching to tie a shoe

Reading to sleep after a long day on her feet

A smudge

A dot

A deficit

Not the woman studying through the night

Rising to take her children to Sunday school

Not the father washing the Sunday dinner dishes

Daily reading a page from Encyclopedia Britannica

Older siblings washing small faces

Accompanying them to school up cold cement steps

Not the husband riding an austere metal car

Pants sharply creased, tie bobbing against Adam's apple

Arriving first and leaving last

Eating cold egg sandwiches so his children can have the last of the luncheon meat

He and his wife sharing the last cup of coffee

Even though he takes his black and she takes hers with cream and sugar

Not the silver-haired grandmother

That comes to live with the woman

Whose husband was "protected" and "served" to death

The life insurance enough

To cover funeral costs

To allow her to purchase a second-hand made-in-America car

Because she only buys domestic

Not the woman in dress and heels

Who hurries from her job at Sak's

To meet her boyfriend

To celebrate their second anniversary

Next week she will be with her girlfriends

Laughing over a home-cooked meal

Celebrating nothing at all

While across town at his best friend's

Her boyfriend will be doing the same

A smudge

A dot

A deficit

Aight