They give us food here.
My mother always taught me to look
Inside the clearance bin at grocery stores
All the way in the back back, the bar code
Sliced through with a permanent marker
And a new handwritten price, fifty cents or a dollar.
Here, they place the food on plastic picnic tables
Here, the give us almost expired chocolates on Fridays
One day there were golden balloons tied to a tall parking cone
A celebration of sorts, if you squint a little at all the food
One day, I took a frozen tray and bit into a cheese ravioli
Before I noticed a dark mass multiplying like a tumor
Across my fork and down my throat from the bits I already ate.
I spat it out.
And went back for more the next day.

I wear a mask the color of my mother’s hair.
That I bought at Smart & Final around the corner
Did you know there is a national coin shortage?
I saw a sign there at the register. What do the
People living at the park do now?
An economy that saves lives with the currency of coins.

An abuelita in front of me pushes an empty baby stroller for her food
A viejito holds a dandelion yellow bag from Forever 21
We push and pull our food back to our familias
A jacaranda petal falls into a curl of my hair, inside my bag, the cement.
The trees are not surprised to see this sickness
They observe how we gather food now.
I walk and a man inside a truck
Who looks like my father
Slows down, leans over, demands, “Donde vas?”
I grab and go. A prayer for protection.
My mother taught me this too.
A desperation that usually doesn’t work.
The trees know this too.

My mask cannot deter men
Like that man in the truck, like my father,
And probably your father too.
My mask, my sweater, my food for my child
The man’s breath and his threat is noxious in the air
See how it binds with the smog from the freeway
Lifetimes of soot within my lungs, the bronchioles,
Pulmonary veins, the diaphragm a container for both lungs and grief.

At home, I close the door to the world and we feast
On little pouches of cold baby carrots, fresh apples,
Hamburgers with too much gristle and grease, cheese pizza
Smeared with thick hydrogenated oils that the tongue
Cannot wick away from the mouth, cookies and cakes,
And rotten raviolis.

These become parts of my son’s new cells
The lining of his tissues, the marrow of his bones
Producing platelets and pleas to live another day.
Because a brown boy almost his age was shot in the back a few years ago.
Just down the street. A police officer did it. He is alive. The boy is not.
But they don’t know that my son’s blood produces pandemics too.
Can you hear it? When the bones release blood? It is like a boiling.
The next day, I am on the sidewalk again
Lined with purple petals of possibilities.
The jacaranda taught me this.