A puddle with a rainbow film of gasoline on it is a small, ordinary sight, and Nathaniel S. Rounds builds a whole inheritance out of it. Two boys, Michael and John, splash in the same dirty water. From that image the poem widens into a portrait of what these children have been given: poverty, mixed parentage, a world already polluted, and, at the very end, a love of language.
The first thing to notice is the contrast between beauty and harm. "Rainbow sheen" is a pretty phrase, but it sits directly beside "gasoline," and the two nearly rhyme, as if the poem can't mention one without the other. The children don't see the danger. What they have is "unselfconsciousness," a long, soft word that sits oddly among "welfare rags" and "hunger sandwiches." Rounds lets innocence and deprivation share a line without comment. The reader supplies the ache.
The poem is built on a refrain, "We have." It comes back as a list of possessions: "welfare rags," "God as Dad," "crossing guard as / Shelter," "two different / Mothers." It is a strange inventory. The boys own almost nothing material, so the poem counts the people and ideas that have stood in for security. A crossing guard, a stranger in a uniform whose job is to stop traffic, becomes a kind of shelter. That detail suggests how thin the boys' protection is, and how grateful they are for any.
The mothers get the poem's most tender passage. They "ate penny candy / Between hunger sandwiches / While they carried us in / Their bellies." The phrase "hunger sandwiches" is the standout. A sandwich should be food, but here the meals are so scanty that hunger is the filling, with a little sweetness squeezed between. The sentence also stretches across several short lines, so it feels slow and heavy, like pregnancy. Naming "Mary and Liz" gives the mothers an identity of their own. Judging by the names, a reader might also hear echoes of Mary and Elizabeth from the Gospels, and of Michael the archangel, though the poem never insists on it. If that reading is right, the biblical names add a mock-grandeur to a scene of puddles and rags.
The strangest move is the fathers. "God as Dad" sounds like comfort, perhaps the stand-in for a missing parent. Near the end, though, the boys were "Fathered" by Lucifer, "Leaded like // Lucifer who // Fathered us both." The line breaks make the reader wait, then deliver the shock. "Leaded" works two ways: leaded gasoline poisons, and the L-sounds in "Leaded," "like" and "Lucifer" link the devil to the fuel. Lucifer's name also means "light-bringer," which fits the shimmering film on the puddle. The result is that the children's world is both holy and tainted, and the poem refuses to pick one parent. It reads as a claim that a child can inherit grace and damage in the same breath. "Second-hand smoke" fits here too, since the word "second-hand" suggests that even harm is handed down.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with short lines, capitalised line openings, and almost no punctuation. The breaks often fall on small words ("and," "as," "who"), which leaves the reader hovering mid-thought. That suits a poem about being in the middle of things. Repetition of "Puddle" and "gasoline" frames the poem like a loop, and the title's casual "Get Their Flashback On" prepares for the memory-like drift. It is a jokey, slangy phrase set against hard material, and that clash of tones is part of the poem's character.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than a catalogue of hardship. After all that hunger for food, the final line gives a different appetite: "With a hunger for words / As song." There is no full stop, as though the song has only started. The boys were hungry and polluted, and yet they came out wanting to sing. That reversal is the poem's real significance. It suggests that poetry can grow out of deprivation, and that the same hunger that empties a child's stomach can drive them toward language.