Intersection

I.

What separates us are painted

lines, drawn across thick asphalt.

You, standing on a street corner,

your hunger held between both hands

and scrawled across cardboard.

Me, sitting in a car I can’t afford,

listening to NPR, waiting for

the traffic light to change.

Moving coordinates on the map,

we sometimes collide like this—

our paths intersecting along the roadway.

II.

What separates us

is a short distance between curbs—

the paved road I’m driving and

the graveled space beneath

the underpass where you sit.

That I might hunger food is unlikely

upon this road where you sometimes live

and work the corners.

I possess what is cast from the mold

from which I emerged, wanting

for neither food nor shelter,

neither clothes nor shoes.

My hunger is relative.

A need for more than the paltry sum

of being alive and surviving, it is bent

to the shape of my shame for breathing

in and out and still living.

III.

What separates us is my car’s glass window,

through which we observe one another,

not unfriendly or friendly in our mutual gaze,

but a casual assessment of the other.

You are hungry,

and I am hunger.

We are close enough to speak,

but we don’t.

© Ami Mattison

Flickr photo courtesy of zen

For One Stop Poetry's One Shot Wednesday