Cost and Use

Velvet slippers, one on the sidewalk, the other, debris
in a yard. A vanished woman, split in two by mesh fence.
At midnight, she walked barefoot. At midday, a man
faces the Latin Chef window. He reads the menu, his eyes

eat each item. His hands spread the wallet, his eyes
count each dollar. In one history, this is the end.
In another, a beginning. Along the block, people tend
their yards. Beatrice can see who remembers the country, crammed

into buckets of dirt, cantilevered on old boards, farmed
with okra, basil, tomatoes, aloe, cilantro, blue corn,
bitter melon. Twine takes bean vines up into a crown,
a shawl of shade. How frightened she was when she moved

into the four rooms, no yard, no way to grow her food.
To eat she always has to sell something. Her deft hands,
like women who paint roses by the hour, fancy designs
flowering on the edges of plates they can't afford to buy.

Or words that she strings together, ideas of things, dry
fertile seeds made by the sunflowers now turning their heads
in an arc of light in the yard beside her:

                                                             Between thought and deed,
she is rife with words, enough and not worth a penny a pound.

But they answer a need sharp as hunger and thirst. They feed the doubt
that gnaws on habit and the past. They pay for the act that breaks free.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999)

Trash

That day the most beautiful thing she saw was pigeons.
Neatly dressed in grey and silver stripes, or snuff brown,
like office workers, except the shocking ascot, the neck
oilslick green and purple, the finicky pink naked feet.

Walking barefoot in broken glass and crushed paper cups,
what are the pigeons learning? Assiduously searching through
the scattered trash of human lives, they startle Beatrice.
She's used to them flying by like windblown plastic bags.

Now she's fixed by one scavenger eye, coy,
shy, trash with consciousness. The bird cocks its head
sideways, feminine wile, a friend's attention. Suddenly

       she's standing in a city peopled by birds, their hub-bub
       conversation, and their wheeling flight toward home, the rock
       cliffs of skyscraper and church steeple, each cranny and nook
       they remember from when they nested there, rockdove
       high above the river in the granite palisades, long before
       convenient niche apartments were built for them by men.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999)

The Blue Cup

Through binoculars the spiral nebula was
a smudged white thumbprint on the night sky.
Stories said it was a mark left by the hand
of Night, that old she, easily weaving
the universe out of milky strings of chaos.

Beatrice found creation more difficult.
Tonight what she had was greasy water
whirling in the bottom of her sink, revolution,
and one clean cup.

                               She set the blue cup
down on the table, spooned instant coffee, poured
boiling water, a thread of sweetened milk. Before
she went back to work, she drank the galaxy that spun
small and cautious between her chapped cupped hands.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (1999)

The A & P

She rolled a tomato in her hand, pink rubber
ball engineered to fit a machine. The motion
recalled Florida, toward the Glades, Pahokee,
Belle Glade, Miccosukee, fields crawling
with tomato plants, and the proportion all wrong
between the rows: wide enough for a truck to drive
through. A truckload of migrant workers, Cuban,
Haitian, Jamaican, perhaps Creek, Seminole,
turning, rolling to a spot on the horizon, stopping
somewhere, the next unpicked spot the same,
on the row, assembly line.

                                             A voice from somewhere
                  urban, in her ear: We have forgotten where
                  our food comes from.

                                                         But she remembered exactly.
      Between the rows of manufactured produce she remembered
      Lib Martin's bucket of tomatoes: green, red,
      irregular skin cracked like red dirt, drought,
      rain. The acid juice gushed against thirst.

Not forgetting. Learning certain things, like these sweet
potatoes, knobbed roots broken to yellow clay,
eating them baked as some ate clay, hot
from the sun, comfort. Sweet potatoes twenty cents a pound.

A man in Nash County died digging them last fall,
forty cents a bucket, seventy buckets a day, take out
a hundred fifty bucks a month for beans and rice.

                  Pull wild salad, fish the Tar River, drink
                  cheap wine, a dollar a pint. Can't escape,
                  beaten with tree limbs, the woods full of snakes. Be
                  so hot. Fall into dirt from your own digging, and die.

Not about forgetting. Never being told.

        Eating the lives of others like a child, unconscious,
        sucking the breast. Herself as a girl sucking
        sugar cane by the gas heater, hot, sweet,
        knowing nothing of the cold field, the knives of cane,
        the women and the men, rounding the mill like mules.

But it was about forgetting. Every day she wanted to
forget something she'd learned about the house, the fields,
the lopped cedar posts propping up the scuppernong arbor,
the fallen grapes fermenting on the ground. If she could have,
just tonight, a little white wine. The amnesiac sugar,
liquor, how good it tastes. It used to be whiskey,
or a little rum-and-coke.

                                            How drunk she got
         that night, her and the two men, drunk, standing up
         in the boat between two rivers of stars, between
         the muddy banks of the Black Warrior.
                                                                          They sang
         until the boat sank, then waded out as if
         free in another country. She'd washed the black muck
         off her feet, clinging weight, erosion, lives
         she knew, lives she did not know. She had walked
         up the bank, stagger, not like her father. Just like
         her father. What did he know?

                                                                Too much, her mother said,
                 he knows too much to be happy.

                                                                            Drinking to forget
         what he did, or what he should have done? At the river,
         the river bottom land.

                                                      Maybe the grapefruit in her hand,
          yellow globe, pink flesh, came from there, prison farm
          in the bottoms. Hot boxes. Boxes of fruit. Each piece
          wrapped like a jewel in green tissue paper.

She had learned about grapefruit, lemons, oranges.
In the store, workers unpack them like presents. Pesticide
spreads skin to skin, and your hands begin to die,
go numb, skin falls off, membrane of a peeled orange.

                   Stay conscious, a voice said. Can't do nothing if you don't
                   stay conscious. Right foot should know what the left foot is doing.

But every time, every damn time, she walked
into this A & P to get groceries, she had to decide
not to be like her father. Decide like tonight.
No grapefruit, no tomatoes, none of that Iowa honey,
bees that never saw a flower, their universe a warehouse.
Ask where the sweet potatoes came from. Then a few
in a paper sack, thudding like lumps of dirt.

Then her feet up and down the aisles twice as wide
as a row should be hoed, making her feet take her
past, her hand not reach down a bottle, not even
the scuppernong that could give her back herself
innocent, under the arbor, sucking grapes down
to the skin, the familiar taste, numbness, a long
slow spiral down the river, oblivion's boat,
her feet never stepping out on either side of land.

She made herself walk past the wine, to check-out,
to figure up how much this food would cost her.
She could dig up the backyard again this spring,
some rows of tomatoes, some cane poles spiraling
bean vines. Some squash, three seeds and a fish head
at the bottom of each hole.
                                               The dead silver eye
would look at her again. Again she would ask herself
the use of what she was doing, and again as she hoed,
barefoot in blackjack clay, and as the tomatoes came in
to be picked, eaten, given to friends, canned for winter.
Again as the blisters came, and then the calluses on her hands.

:: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Walking Back Up Depot Street (Pittsburgh, 1999)