I am about mid-way through reading Fourteen: Growing Up Alone in a Crowd by Stephen Zanichkowksy. In this book, Zanichkowksy tells his childhood story — being the eighth child in a family of fourteen, born to a hot-tempered father and an overwhelmed mother who were both physically abusive to their children. In this dark and disturbing memoir, he tells how such an upbringing affected him, leaving him living inside his head, with difficulty connecting to other human beings and a longing for a sense of a separate self away from the crowd.

In one section, he talks about the mass-produced school lunches in his house:

“I remember days I went to school without my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, because the image of the mass production of those sandwiches hurt me…Perhaps the sameness of our sandwiches was a reminder that, to outsiders, we kids were all the same, interchangeable.”

The images of sandwiches haunted me and brought to the surface of an old childhood memory. So while this poem is very tenuously linked to the prompt, I’d like to share it anyway. It is lengthy, but worth the read. I hope you walk away from it with something.