Robert D Valerio
Shoping for Fruit in Oaxaca
We’d come back from the Wednesday market, dragging
our crippled shopping-trolley, stuffed with bruised
mangoes, half-papayas cut jagged like jaws
of sharks or carnivorous tulips from Mars.
The worn-down rubber wheels snagged on rubble,
sludged through black rivulets of effluence,
our street’s uninfrastructured dishwater mixing
grey foam with the dry season’s hoarse red clay.
Down at the bottom of the trolley, buckling
the cage’s feeble metal outwards, sprawled
the fat green oranges, never less than fifty,
other fruit piled upwards in ascending
order of mushiness, finishing with pale brown
and treacly yet subtle chicozapotes,
luxurious and perishable, always
the last thing we would buy, the first we’d eat,
thumbnailing open their sandpapery skins
and fobbing out the ebony
pips between sweet kisses; only then
would one of us frown, remembering the bread.
Page(s) 31
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