Eating Against a Wall

She rolled out the bamboo mat
near a brick wall
                              as her husband hoisted
a gallon milk jug to his lips
                                                 to gulp down water.
Then with their lank arms draped
over their raised knees—
chopsticks in one hand, cool-whip bowl in the other,
heads slumped—
                                they tugged
at clumps of noodles,
                                       slurping them up.
Though I didn’t think of it then,
                                                          it was the first
time I’d seen someone eat with sticks.

I peered out from my seat on the bus
thinking that eating
                                    had never been so
                                                                      transient,
that somehow we all end up here,
                                                                 displaced,
documented.

“Eating Against a Wall ” appears in Dark Thirty (University of Arizona Press, 2009).