Evacuation Day 2006, Roche Bros. Market, West Roxbury, Mass.

After the organinc carrots' orange cascade, tumbling
from their ersatz pushcart, after the defiant
wonder of February asparagus and strawberries, after
the stacks of cold-cuts that tower like a distant metropolis
with their display's gleaming lens, after
the skittering panic of lobsters hurled
against the blue green force-field
of their pound,

one more of West Roxbury's thick
ankled legion of young matrons stands paralyzed
before the vast acreage of the meat case,
weighing options. After all,
this is a day to toast heroes and
surely someone on the block's
got at least one more cousin to salute, licking
a stump in Baghdad.

The scale gives pause here,
as if some vast, lowing plain of kine has bowed
obedient before the knife to sate
Boston's ascendant hibernian class. She surveys
the heaped joints weeping gore into their clingy plastic raiment, and
reaches to caress a slab
of corned beef easily as large as either of the straw haired
spalpeens squawling in the cart, indeed nearly
expansive as her own milk weighted midriff,
and thinks
never again will wild boys lunge
for my groin in the starlight as we sprawl, logy
with purloined lager down by the gravel
quarry on a spunk
scented late spring Saturday. Now
it is only to home
and weigh starch, subdue the brats, endure
love as it arrives long after work
is done and the last natter
of the late night hosts has subdued to blue-white fog.

Two miles away, the Dorchester Heights still command
the town. But a new brand of conscripts now toils
at the breastworks. And, tossing her chosen palp of flesh
upon the conveyor's scrolling black lip, our gal is deaf to the creak
of ancient bearings, the rust throated protest
of the cast iron guns
as slowly they pivot from the harbor to the West.

Kosta Demos