Bob Lucky

Public Market

We grab our bags and walk into town to buy produce for the week. Strolling up and down the aisles, we make note of who has what and what we’ll go back for. Sometimes, feeling lazy, we’ll opt for the cleaned onions and potatoes, the shiny beetroots, but usually we buy from the farmers who leave a bit of the field on their vegetables. Besides the cucumber and chile and basil growing in pots on our balcony, it’s the closest we’ll ever get to having a farm. On the way out, we pick up some bread and cheese and sausages and a bottle of wine, olive oil when we need it. At the end of the last row, there’s a black-clad widow on a stool, with two small plastic bags filled with shelled fava beans. People drop spare change onto her cloth. No one ever buys the beans. And her expression never changes.

spring morning —
squinting into the sun
all the way home

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Bob Lucky is the author most recently of My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019) and the chapbook Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), which was a winner of the James Tate Poetry Prize in 2018. Lucky lives in Portugal, where he is working his way through all the regional cheeses and wines.