Pennies are brown and dirty.
They stink of bus stops.
They will never add up to
a million dollars no matter
how many you collect in jars.
It’s bad luck to throw a penny
away so I always bend down
when I sweep one up.
I’ve heard it costs more than
one cent to make a penny now
and that they are not even
real copper (but I haven’t been
to Snopes to check this out).
If you name a girl Penny,
I’m not sure what you expect from her.
Sometimes at work, I take a
filthy corroded one, where you
can’t even recognize Abraham Lincoln
and drop it in a jar of 10% nitric acid for
an hour- than it pretties up
like the day it was minted and all
the grime of the decades dissolves
away, all the pockets exchanged, dirty hands,
and register drawer dust- it’s gone now
and I see a date-
1957- was it a good year?
Pennies are like us.