Nothing

After Christmas, we go to the government office
            to get what Momma calls food money,
                        bills with colored stamps she keeps behind

the plastic flap in her checkbook. She takes a number,
            ninety-six, and we wait on hard blue chairs, watch
                        the television in the corner. It plays The Neverending Story,

a movie we’re not allowed to see, but we watch
            anyway, the flying luck dragon, the horse that drowns.
                        We go back after the Fourth of July, but they say we make

too much, send us to the school down the street for free milk,
            cornbread they offer in the summer. On metal
                        benches in the cafeteria, we eat, watch the other kids

watch us, their clothes dirty, their feet bare.
            When summer’s over, we help serve dinners in church
                        after night service and Momma brings her big purse, sneaks

bread rolls, apples inside. Sometimes, when storms
            come through, service is cancelled, the dinner, too,
                        and Momma gives us big cups of water before bed, tells us

to drink, to make our stomachs full and on these nights, I dream
            about the boy in The Neverending Story, the gate of mirrors,
                        and the Nothing, a dark cloud that floats in the sky, takes away everything.

Tawnysha Greene is currently a Ph.D. candidate in fiction writing at the University of Tennessee where she serves as the fiction editor for Grist: A Journal for Writers. Her work has appeared in various literary journals including Necessary Fiction and Bluestem, and is forthcoming in Emprise Review. She can be found online at http://www.tawnyshagreene.com.