Who is jealous any time
someone wins a Powerball
and it isn’t you–even though
you didn’t buy a ticket, haven’t
bought one in years?
Let it not be some repressed
bureaucrat, we think, who never
donates to charity and ignores
her children’s birthdays.
Not a software engineer who
divorced his wife when his mistress
got pregnant either.
We want the winner to have
grown up eating fried crackers
for dinner, shoes held intact
with duct tape, teenage weekends
mopping floors at Target.
Lots of chapped winters, threadbare
bedsheets, drafty windows.
Or make it someone who plans
to share the ka-ching with his trucking
pool at the warehouse, someone whose
ideal day is at a fishing pond with his boys
or who wears an apron in a soup kitchen,
fosters stray cats.
We want proof that kindness counts,
the universe makes puzzle pieces
that actually fit, rewards get
sprinkled fairly.
Author of six collections of poetry, Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies. They’ve been made into videos, posted inside taxis, coated coffee can labels and java jackets, and even plastered the hind quarters of city buses.
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