Published in Issue 62.3: Summer 2023
Miami, FL
The job of the wall is to keep
the noise of the traffic from reaching the houses
on the other side, while the job of the tree is to grow
over the wall, stretching to eat the morning sun
it uses to manufacture the fruit that hangs,
for three weeks in June, like disobeyed traffic lights
changing slowly from the color of night
to a shade of noon.
No one ever picks these mangos
but the tree keeps on making them. It doesn’t
need a beneficiary to give a blessing, dropping
them without warning onto the asphalt
where they break and bleed out their juice
into a permanent shadow, the highway
like a piece of paper onto which
the tree draws a picture of itself.
P. Scott Cunningham is the author of Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, A Public Space, RHINO, Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. He lives in Miami, Florida, where serves as the Executive Director of O, Miami.
