Infinity Money
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      I wish I had infinity money.
                         — Carrie Sturgeon, third grade

I sense somehow that it is blue, the sky of a summer’s
day, the kind that starts at 6:30 a.m. with nothing

planned for the whitening diem. And your parents are
both alive and married to each other. And the other kids

on your block don’t have it as good as you on your front
porch swing, looking up at the jade leaves of impossibly

tall elms, winking at you like there’s some secret in
the swing’s rhythm and your pilfered bedroom pillow

as you lie under the endless blueness of infinity money.
The writing must be a type of rune, hieroglyphic, or

sanskrit and read the same backwards as forward like
the snake that eats its own tail in the ocean of the world

or double-helix that is almost the dollar sign on the keys
of a typewriter. It buys ambrosia and everyone’s life and

you cannot run out of it, no matter your trying. Its ink stains
your hands. You’re a blue blood and I don’t think you can

give it back. But they mean what the rich have. They mean
it like a kajillion, something they’ve never counted to but like

to say as a joke. They want nothing to stop, not Halloween
candy, love or bicycles. They are third graders. They mean

the new concept they’ve learned in class, one more thing they’re
not supposed to know like sex or excess. That something goes

on and keeps going on makes sense. For them, more than
three is many and they have written this term in a wish. It’s how

all the things they cannot pay for, yet will have to, are summed up
in this blue tender, how they know already what costs everything.

 

From New Numbers by Josie Kearns
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