Immigrant Song at a Food Truck

I touch your back with my dirty hands.

I open you.

I feel the growing heat

          between the sinews

            and the egg-white bun.

                       I eat the white of the bun.

                       I used to make cranes

                                   that you tossed away

                                               like promises

                                   in a severing winter.

                       I come to you in my dirty self, a poster

                                   full of deliberate errors

                                               made under duress

                                   by a young and willful staff.

                       Here I eat you. Here, a food truck

                                   sells sorrows in bun-sized bits, with you

                                               wrapped in newspaper articles

                                                           with jarring terms.

                                               I eat you whole, including

                                   the mayo on the photos, but soon

                       darkness drizzles, my image of you

            is a blur, my pen a bird in the air,

                       a uniformed officer smiles at me

            to scrape off even the salt in my hair

and dumps it back into the ocean.