The Woman Vegetable Vendor She pulls her handcart through her dream-debris. Now her Ph.D. is just an agonizing adornment. She’s been denied white-collar jobs for religious reasons. Even a name is flammable in the fanatic drought. Here religion doesn’t purify, but petrify. Yet she surfaces, scuba-diving through her secret sorrows. The toot of hunger from her children’s stomachs keeps her installed in the masked street. They come again to drive her away – this time, under the pretense of the pandemic protocol. She protests vehemently in English . The crowd is enticed by her fluency in the foreign language. Her molten emotion spurts. Hers is never an artificial countenance of a contestant in a beauty pageant. Her words are not tomatoes and potatoes, but the hottest red chilies. Will the dark rubber eyes see her close-cropped life? First published in Lumpen.