poetry from Anselm Brocki

Skirmish

“Don’t you dare
give me those old
rotten apples you’re
hiding behind there!”

That’s Louise, my
child mother, insulting
a swarthy, broken-English
fruit seller at Grand
Central Market in 1933,
She’s twenty-six,
I’m ten. He fills a paper
bag and grumbles back
in Middle European
from behind an artful
display mound of his
freshest fruit. Neither
of them thinks the
other quite human.

“We’ll wait till we get
home to wash these,”
she says loudly before
we leave. “No telling
where his hands
have been.”

I look at his smeared apron,
white cap bagging down
on both sides, dark
eyes, five o’clock shadow
and dirty fingernails but
can’t imagine yet what awful
things he has been doing
with his hands.

--Anselm Brocki