Breadfruit

The sun welds itself to Sunnyholt Road,

lights blur into liquid over the asphalt car park of Parklea Market.

Cars idle, engines hum with their mouths half open,

traffic horns bleed into the thick murmur of chatter.

Wet boxes drip coriander water,

blue tarps snap and belly in the wind like sails caught mid-tack on a reef.

Mangoes bruised from too many hands,

apples polished for someone else’s table.

In the corner crate, something green waits in its own shadow.

Its skin is rough,

cool like river stones, beneath a canopy of pandanus.

I trace it the way my grandmother read the stars,

Pattern by pattern, silence by silence.

Tiny hexagons rise and nest under my fingertips,

a geography I could navigate blind.

Each ridge a small hill, each hollow a valley,

as if an island had folded itself into this globe of green.

The surface does not invite softness

it keeps its own counsel,

a guarded map,

a husk that remembers storms.

In Nukunuku,

one dropped from my grandmother’s tree

and rolled to my bare feet.

We roasted it on basalt black from a hundred fires,

smoke curling with the smell of coconut husk and rain.

When the flesh split beneath her machete’s silver grin,

she told me:

this is the food that waits for us,

when rice bags empty

or the lagoon sulks and lines come back bare.

We ate until our bellies

rose like full tides,

until hunger forgot the road to our house.

I turn it once more in my palm,

Its heft leaning into the bones of my wrist.

Here, the air is frying chicken from the stall out front,

Oil popping in bright little bursts that freckle the air with salt.

My daughter tugs at the hem of my denim skirt,

pointing to blueberries we cannot afford.

The green globe rests in a cardboard cradle,

its price written in red ink

a small wound for the poor mans food.

Its scent reaching through the noise

to a yard where trees fed us for nothing,

where our pockets were empty but our branches bowed.

I set it back.

It stays there,

round as the moon over Tongatapu,

waiting for another set of hands

to take home the breadfruit.