Our Own Making

Market
The scent of it familiar for blocks; fresh and rotting fruit,
twenty kinds of potatoes still carrying the earth on them.
This is the center of life: hundreds of bodies sweating and hungry,
and the dogs waiting for scraps. One hand for change and another
for this woven plastic bag, bulging as we do, bellies rounded
for a moment rich with newborn fruit. A certain red—a beet,
this textile, hands raw with labor—my feeding is the work of centuries.
In that corner: vegetable foliage, birds of paradise, little Amazon bared
for our taking. Still damp with its rains, still home to the grasshopper,
the mantis that came so far upriver in its folds. The smallest of bodies
that knew this land before it ever thought of us; before this basin
knew a mouth to sip from it; before the cacao seed was plucked;
before, even, it had a name—and so long before it began to burn.
Beneath these tents where we have sheltered from rain
with the dogs and the flies: if only we had stayed like this, weaving
between stacks of rice, gathering shellfish, spitting out seeds.