Farmer's Market, and: Since Yesterday
Rent from DeepDyve- Farmer's Market, and: Since Yesterday
Farmer's Market
The harvests line each sideof the aisle, golden withcompletion, sugared from coldnights that blossomed intoautumn, dead leaves frou-froufor large-bellied fruit. [End Page 157]
The red-faced man bagsYorks and Delicious; his wifepolishes the warts of the squash.
A couple from Westporthold up Indian corn,imagining their door,how it will hang there.
So easy here, Saturday,to imagine the waythe first feast of strangershappened under the sunlightof a season yet to surrender.
Since Yesterday
My heart has eaten itself twice,the first time to get even,the second to proveI had not imagined the ache
of how I felt, pulled inwardfrom within, not at all likebeing shot or stabbedor falling to my deathin the cold from the rocksstrewn with dangerousgravel at the cliff's edge.
This is nothing like the snakethat swallows its tail [End Page 158] or the dog that chasesits tail, gone idiot in the autumnor spring because petscan do that. Not I.
The whole world enters throughmy mouth as if to witnessthe unimaginable, and I feellight slipping from the roomas if it has been borrowedor, more likely, sold offwhen I wasn't paying attention.
Robert Parham has work forthcoming in Shenandoah, Folio, Oxford American, and Southern Review. Other work has appeared in the Georgia Review, Southern Humanities Review, Rolling Stone, Atlanta Magazine, and other journals. His chapbook What Part Motion Plays in the Equation of Love won the Palanquin competition.
