Hard Up
Poetry by M.P. Carver
$12.00
Praise for Hard Up
Rich people spend their money / on other money. / I spend my money on string, colorful string”– How can poetry about poverty and the injustices of late-stage capitalism contain so much joy? How can poems court absurdism without cynicism? How can poetry be both empathetic and irreverent? I wish we all knew what M.P. Carver knows.
—J.D. Scrimgeour, Salem, MA Poet Laureate, author of Lifting the Turtle
Why Do Teenage Girls Travel in Groups of 3, 5, or 7?
Because they literally can’t even. My favorite joke.
I remember being a teenager, wandering around
with my friends at the Liberty Tree Mall, down
the street from our public housing complex.
All us mall rats were escaping something: empty
houses, screaming drunks, or just pain in the ass
families. At that age, the entire world seemed stupid,
unjust, and stacked against you. We never bought
anything except $2 pretzels at the Auntie Annes,
and the occasional Orange Julius. The authorities
hated us. They put up signs, No Unaccompanied
Minors in Groups of Five or More. How many peeps
in a posse? We laughed. We’d watch the mall cops
coming around to chase us away from
the Suncoast, the Wet Seal, the Spencer’s.
We broke apart and came back together,
a flock of starlings briefly startled by some
dumb, bumbling dog. Early 90s. Everything
seemed bright and clean then. Before ghost malls
and recessions. We were little gods of our
well-appointed domain. We didn’t have money,
but we could bum around and be swept up
in our tidy, colorful, shoppable world just the same
as everyone else. Better, we knew every corner.
Knew, too, the old men, 20s and 30s, even 40s,
who hung around too long, trying to find the girl
whose home was worst, trying to look cool to an unwise
young rebel. This was before we got minimum
wage jobs like our parents, learned what it meant
to be broke and care. Before we understood
how that motel across the street behind the Denny’s,
rented by the hour, stayed in business. Before overdoses.
Before whispering about which girl had fallen in
too deep to get out.
M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches creative and digital writing at Salem State University. Her work has been published in Rattle, Mantis, Jubilat, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. She has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Essex Community Foundation. In 2023 her poem “In Vitro” was named a finalist in the Connecticut River Review’s Experimental Poetry Contest, and in 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015. Her second chapbook, Hard Up, is out from Lily Poetry Review Books in early 2025.