Fruit-sellers waved blood orange samples. My mouth pulled seeds from winter melon.
I was sun-hot in my jacket until I peeled skins to bare shoulders. This was a December California, farmers market grounds, Mexicans and Okies together in produce
against the men with trademarked tomatoes, patented potatoes. Pedigreed feudal potato men in cowboy boots and Cadillac suits lording over fields vast as as Dust
Bowl dreams, fields sprayed heavy with poison, farmers pushed down to serfdom, to dust.
Giant earth drilling tomato men thieving and yet losing their hold on reaping? Look. Manorial men being broken all around the edges by small potatoes and little orchards,
milkers of goats, cheese artisans, freeholders at tables heavy with lettuce for sale under plastic tarps. Big potato man not counting on little ones making change by hand
without barcodes, without patents, without eighteen-wheelers or shipping containers, without coercion, without fear.
The salt of the earth, rising up in a peaceful raid, picking crusts of Ghandi's salt as the big men started to break.
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