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You are here: Home / Contest Winners / in response to the viral r/askreddit thread titled “what’s classy if you’re rich, but trashy if you’re poor?”*

Contest Winners, Nonfiction

in response to the viral r/askreddit thread titled “what’s classy if you’re rich, but trashy if you’re poor?”*

On Saturday, diner day at Cozy’s, I’d wear my new mascara and order a face-sized breakfast. I’d whisper, “do we look rich?”

Grandma wore furs. She said things like “primo” and “I betcha.”

We were fancy together. Fancy. Fancy. Fancy. I’d fancy-chant till I was dizzy.

Grandma was how I learned to salt my pancakes. “To wake the syrup,” she said.

I began salting my eyelids, too, after I first saw her with the palette. Her tender strokes.

We lived with tense necks, seized by a brittle american hope.

Once a week we walked like kings from counter to booth.

*This piece can be read top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top.


[sarah] Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town, and serves as managing editor at Stone of Madness Press and founding editor of swallow:tale press. Author of three chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press), THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), and OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (Ethel Press, 2022), they have also had work in Bitch Magazine, Disability Studies Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Cavar lives online at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.

“in response to the viral r/askreddit thread…” placed 2nd in our 2021 CNF Flash Contest, judged by Heather Christle.

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