Wet Market in Hong Kong

No one sits in your aisles or calls you home. Scales and feathers, pink blood from a gutted fish, fresh blood from a pig split neck to anus. No one protests the violence we eat in this staging of fluorescence and concrete. The ducks shine rich brown soy, the ribs are caramelized, and the cleaver smashes through bone like a tank through soft humans. I walk pressed between baskets of yellow-blossomed choy sum and kai lan dark with chlorophyll, legs spotted by vegetable-rot puddles. The young ginger roots blush translucent among gnarly turnips and pimpled potatoes, crowded among the hems of grannies poking at the flapping wings of the beheaded hen, appraising the bright maw of a snapper that was gasping just a second ago. Like the black-robed sisters holding their scissors, snipping the threads that bind babies to their Mother Earth, mothers to children sleeping a room away, Time and its ledgers open onto the wet market of cut green and slaughtered flesh the grannies and their families’ families will eat for dinner. I enter a child and leave you a granny, hurrying into the humid afternoon, soles slippery with the gore of fieldairwater, migraine blinded, to sit, writing patiently, with the sisters and their scissors.