Interview & Apples

by Devika Ranjan

INTERVIEW

over the meadows and through the woods

to grandmother’s house

to uncle’s house

to anyone’s house

and then to the school

and then to the berm

where we wait to cross and wait to cross and

hot cross buns

one a penny two a penny

we could not buy anything.

but the heat was unbearable

and the crowds were so dense

and we could not find any food,

could not even fetch a pail of water

and then we tried again.

but everywhere that Mary went

Mary went

Mary went

the war was sure to go.

we got on the boat then

with this little one in tow

the butcher the baker the candlestick maker

and all of us out to sea

I held her so tight, I was so scared,

I tried to tell her about where we were going

about the things she would learn

row row row your boat

merrily merrily merrily merrily

she’s learning English I think

she will speak better than any of us

just see

we sing together

ABC, show aunty ABCs

I try not to sound upset

they say even babies can tell

even when she was inside she could tell

so we sing instead

merrily merrily merrily merrily

APPLES

We exist on heat-maps and in security cameras that the cowboy vigilantes mounted to the peripheries of their territory; on the soft strung sentences of NPR in your car while you wait for your wife to finish at the grocery store; within the caverns of the holding rooms, still in the holding rooms, short-term holding rooms but indefinite still, still and silent. We exist on the dust of the plantations and we exist with the tomatoes and the strawberries and the apples and the oranges without seeds and the pomegranates that shortened to POM. Plucked and cleaned and sorted and checked, no bad apples. We exist in the sun, through easy peel sunburns, through dense flesh. And for our fruits we exist on the payroll. We exist on money orders and transaction costs.

No bad hombres on the census, no bad apples in the stock.