stamps
- Jun 17, 2022
- 2 min read
by aureleo sans
We’ve gotta arrive at the DSS office an hour early on the day they give out food stamps or else we will be there all day, and nobody is happy, and everybody is whining including Mamá, who’s saying why did I cross the Caribbean to come to this mentiroso country as she stuffs the girls into jackets like reluctant dolls; they’ve got to come along because you don’t leave babies by themselves, even though we all wish for bed when the light on the bus that early in the morning is too much yellow, and our eyes have too much crust, and on my index finger, I look at the yellow crust in the yellow light, and I dream of a gold rush and how having money can change everything but we have no money and that’s why we ride on a bus that stinks and why we stand in single file and why I swallow every last bit of gold; meanwhile, our position in the snaky line goes from the rattle to the stomach to the fangs: the non-smiling lady behind the glass barrier, who hides her eyes and slips us the stamps; in my mind, I’ve already teleported to our next bus stop: Swanson’s, where we sort through about-to-expire perishables and irregular items for treasures at discounted prices; once we found bacon-wrapped filet mignon; once we found shampoo that smelled like bear bottle honey but right now we are sizing up dimpled cans of fruit cocktail and Vienna sausages, Mamá says, life is about balance; it’s like these cans; you’ve got to pick the cheapest ones with the fewest number of dents, and I tell her that Mrs. Grimmer, the social studies teacher, said messed up cans can kill people, but she says no te preocupes and she’s right; the cans are not what’s going to kill us anyways and not that we care because after Swanson’s, we play Monopoly with the leftover stamps instead of the cash the game is missing.
aureleo sans is a Colombian-American, non-binary, queer, disabled, formerly unhoused writer & poet who lives in San Antonio. She’s a Tin House Scholar, a Periplus fellow, and a flamingo. She has been published/or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Offing, Salamander, Passages North, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Follow her at @aureleos.
