by Riley Londraville ’27 on December 11, 2025
Portfolio - Poetry
The cafe’s website read: Bring in a nonperishable food or a personal care item, we’ll cover half
your tab, and we’ll match your donation, item for item.
A chance she couldn’t pass up. The girl notices a stain on the cement outside the cafe and
wonders where it came from. It could be red wine or something more sinister. Inside, she takes
note of the pin on the jacket of the man who stands in front of her. Make America Great Again.
She wonders when it was so great.
Yesterday, she had watched footage from 1963 in Birmingham, AL. The Children’s Crusade. Torn skin and flesh flushed. Pressure piercing through fire hoses. Justice too long delayed is justice denied.
And later, she saw a video filmed by shaky hands. Skin is still torn on pavement today. Rusted
stains leaving people wondering: Is it red wine or something more sinister?
“Ma! Ma!” the boy cried out, trying to stabilize the camera. Useless evidence without due
process. He sounds young, although the youth in his voice could be his primal fear taking over, deprivation of nurture on the line as his mother’s face scrapes across cement and crimson fills the cracks. Pebbles stab in her skin and her mouth and her palms.
“I have papers,” she says to nobody. The ICE agent readjusts his mask. It almost slipped while he was just doing his job. Making America Great Again.
In line, the girl holds a can of chicken breast that her grandma had sent her to college with.
“You’ll need it,” her grandma said, but the girl didn’t believe she would open the can. They were both right. This was the last day of the promotion. A nine dollar coffee becomes $4.50, and a family without their regular SNAP benefits can have some canned chicken breast. What she refused to eat is another’s fortune. Justice too long delayed is justice denied.
At the counter, she asks the barista for a latte
“Hot or iced?”
Anything but ice.
Make America Great Again.
The barista tells her she can drop her can in the box up front with the rest. Aluminum spills out of cardboard, but she had hoped for more. It’s been eight days without money loaded onto EBT cards, and the president threw a party. Jewels drip from skin in giant glasses. Flappers strutting by, their lavish headpieces held high. Feathers float to the floor as the billionaires grin and mothers can’t buy formula. The girl just learned that children make up 39 percent of all SNAP benefit recipients. Another Children’s Crusade. Justice too long delayed is justice denied.
The girl walks past the stained cement on her way out. She hopes it’s red wine, not something more sinister. She wonders if those billionaires would notice, if their expressions would even change. They’re too far gone, she decides. Drunk with greed, their stoned faces would stay cold as ice.
Make America Great Again.