This article features an international inquiry of two high-poverty urban schools, one Canadian and one American. The article examines poverty in terms of "small stories" that educators and students live and tell, often on the edges, unheard and unaccounted for in grand narratives. It also expands the story constellations approach to narrative inquiry by adding a new set of paired stories: stories of poverty--poverty stories. The overall intent is to illuminate in more nuanced ways the complex factors that shape people's lives outside the boundaries of policy prescriptions.