How hard is it to print money, anyway? 
Just ink a dumb stone and strike it 
against templed skin. 
They say, they’ll think about it. 
They say, just wait a few years. 
They say, she’ll be 
put on soon. 
Well, I say, while they’re processing
that transaction, why not also 
put on Rosa Parks or RuPaul, 
or the phenomenon 
who was Maya Angelou. 
Put on Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese, 
I’d like to see those shining ms 
gleaming against green paper. 
Put on a show. 
Put on that record
where Louis Armstrong’s 
jazzy trumpet dances up 
against the silvered silk 
of Ella Fitzgerald’s soprano, 
I imagine those bills would be 
smooth and flexible. 
Put on blue mascara 
and cry the Pacific jealous, 
put on rouge 
and those sheer stockings 
that make even dinner with friends 
scream obscene. 
Put on Dorothy’s ruby slippers, 
and the shoes that the Wicked Stepmother 
tap-danced to death inside of. 
Put on Lizzo, who played that crystal flute, 
the only thing Dolly Madison rescued 
from the 1814 fire besides that distressing portrait 
of George Washington, the famous 
frown that is already plastered on the one dollar. 
Put on the Star of David, 
or the pink triangle turned upside down, 
or the zip ties that car thieves mark targets with. 

Put on the Navajo Nation of Blanding, Utah. 
They are already used to being passed around 
from sweating fingers, a transaction, a bargain, 
just another scrawled note in the ledger. 
Rich white folks lounge in green lawns and dive 
into backyard swimming pools, 
while across the ravine,
they are unable to turn on the tap 
and fill up a glass of drinking water. 
Their community is reduced 
to a stack of paper circulating 
bureaucratic offices, shuffled 
poorly, hearts, diamonds, clubs, 
and spades, spades digging 
in the dry dirt. 
Wherever your umbilical cord is buried 
is where you reside. 
Here, I am buried. 

They won’t split the check 
between us twenty high schoolers,
so I am stuck with a bill, 
and I count up the bills 
with shaky hands and slide
a hidden twenty from out of my shoe, 
and cringe at its sticky sadness, 
but then you were there, a stranger 
with a backwards baseball cap
kind enough to say, 
don’t worry, 
put it on me.