we paper-clipped our dreams inside a warped manila folder and filed them away,
we had no time for pipe dreams in reality.

we had no time to be prophets,
to open our eyes and ears to anything but our annual quotas.

we fell silent behind the banging of our mother’s radiator,
the one she’d been asking us to look at since last spring,
but our fathers have medical bills and our sisters have habits,
so we work our sanity away.

we work to earn the 3x6 inch corpses of the trees that we fought to keep alive when we were 16
and the coal company came into our small town
with their chainsaws and big trucks
and cut down every tree in a 5-mile radius.

we thought stealing the contractor’s keys did any damn good,
but our holler became a plain
because they paid us to pilfer coal out of our now barren mountain.

we work to keep ourselves alive,
to Hell with our values.

we have to sit in our little tan cubicles
and tell people their insurance won’t cover the cost of their firstborn’s radiation.

we had to calmly sit there in our pressed pantsuits
and hear about the mother’s infertility
and how God had blessed them.

we had nodded around the lumps in our throats,
scrambling for a way to mention a payment plan.

we had been cursed and screamed at through the father’s hot tears boiling on his cheeks
when he told us the life expectancy
was only a fraction of the time it would take them to pay.

we had kept calm and cool,
because any other retort besides an apology would get us fired.

we heard the banging of our mother’s radiator echoing in our little tan prison,
reminding us that our father still had medical bills
and our sister still had habits.