Remember that time you spent five whole dollars
on a ticket to win a calf at the fair? What you
thought we’d do with a little cow, I have no idea.
We lived in a two-room apartment. We wandered
through the trade hall, looking at things to improve
and repair a home we wouldn’t have for twenty-five
years, considering where a hot tub might go, if we
had a place, or what sort of siding would look best.
We made an investment in ourselves, paid a small
deposit with a promise that, after a year of monthly
checks, a complete set of dishes, flatware and crystal
would be shipped to us. We dreamed of those glasses
and forks on a table we didn’t own yet, pretty dishes
and cutlery that matched. We bought hope in installments,
four full sets of it: serving spoons, teacups, fragile plates.

Carlene M. Gadapee’s chapbook, What to Keep (Finishing Line Press, 2025), joins her poems and reviews in many journals including Allium, Smoky Quartz, Touchstone, Gyroscope Review, Vox Populi, and MicroLit Almanac. Carlene lives and works in northern New Hampshire, where she and her husband have a yard full of fruit trees and a busy beehive.