The miracle of the chain:
here, you could be anywhere
and still find the same winter tomatoes
(Greece, California, Spain),
the same post-Pilates ableists
palming the treeless fruit for bruising.
Last night, a dream: pushing
my cart with the singing wheel
through these neon aisles of peppers
(Peppers! Peppers! All aligned,
ample, capable, rich!), I found
my bearded, balding paramour
laining into the heirlooms: look at all
you are able to do.
For example, the last time I asked God
to kill me I was among the lemons, remembering
the preacher saying, God is a God who is able
to hunger. I wonder,
aren’t we all here for that fast
communion of a stranger reaching
for the same hydroponic melon?
Anything is affordable
when temporary. What thoughts I have of God
divide themselves by expiration: agony and goldenrod
bend under a high wind. Can you hear it?
The field? The imperishable howling?
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. Her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Poet Laureate of Jamaica and Helen Zell Young Writer’s Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. She currently lives in Connecticut near a small river and some train tracks.
