Chicho Brothers Fruit & Vegetable #1

We’d sip gin at a café on the river,
pretending our lives were that fluid, that fine.
Once he said, I’d like to see the Fruit
and Vegetable place one more time.
So I drove him to Laredo Street
but the store was locked. Power outage.
He said, That’s how I feel, loss of power.
We drove around staring at crumbled houses,
trash heaps, pot holes. That’s how I felt,
all of it. We drove back past Chicho’s,
lights were on again.
He stepped inside so tenderly
as if entering a shrine,
placed his hand on a mountain of grapefruit,
and bought nearly nothing because
by then he had almost no time.