The shoe shiners start the day reading the news, their noses in pocket bibles the rest of the afternoon. The newspaper vendors gaze down at the scavenger birds, as if they’re dark words.
Hungry children ardently petition for pesos beneath branches swollen with ripening mangoes and pomegranates and oranges.
I stop on the sidewalk to watch a local carefully arrange a crawling weed in the sidewalk planter. She exclaims: “This is cantaloupe!” And instantly the crops of berries and peas and tomatoes surreptitiously installed throughout the city, are visible and surrounding me.
Invisible
–Jose Garcia Villa
My body is a bottle of white glass:
why has not somebody poured red wine into me
that I should become beautiful?
My body is a green leaf:
why have I not dried, that I should blow away
to infinity, with many winds?
*Make the invisible startlingly visible.
