Found Money
they say
a penny on heads
is luck,
but I pick up
every one.
even the grimy,
tails-up,
tire-worn ones
pressed into blacktop
like tiny graves
for moments no one kept.
he would have
picked them up too
for the principle,
he’d say.
as if worth
were measured
in how much you notice.
and I notice now.
how small things stay
after the big ones go.
how grief
sometimes gleams
in the gutter.
and how
you bend
to retrieve it
every time.
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Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician whose poetry explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and meaning. A lifelong New Englander and married mother of three, she writes in the quiet hours before dawn. Her work has appeared in redrosethorns, Medmic, and Red Eft Review, with more forthcoming. When not taking care of patients or writing, she can be found running, traveling, spending time with her family or sipping a finely crafted matcha latte.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 