stranger

Inside the Ideal market,
I am not standing in line to buy a calling card
to Honduras or
Nicaragua or
Brazil or
Haiti, El Salvador, no I
am spending a great deal of time thumbing the avocadoes
there are overripe ones on top
of underripe ones and there is
this woman standing next to me
and there is me.

On Christmas day, Karelyn told me to stop
smushing the plantains with my fingers.
But how else will I know if they’re ripe?
I am always touching things at the ideal market.
Picking up cans of beans
running my fingers below rows of sponges
and trash bags.
I am pressing my knuckles into
plastic tubes of crema
as a measure. My fingers keep distance
with their beat and even in these narrow aisles I can
slip past re-stockers
and clerks and dinner shoppers
behind their backs and
over their heads no need
for permiso, excuse me.


Outside again with my backpack full,
I pass by the 830 am table twice. No one
offers me a complementary CD, and
I am not ready to leave yet.
I wish to dissolve into a place.
Into a plexiglass stand full of tamarind,
hands reaching dial soap off the top shelf and
knees circling softly to this beat. To dissolve
into syllabic whirrs and the way thumbs
can flutter a stack of cards.

I am like a child who has discovered
that language is an act of volition.
Who stands behind a birch tree to hide,
as if withholding would transcend her to air.