Chef walks out the kitchen’s rear door, having quick-gaited through the main area with the ovens and ranges, where dishes are cooked for service, a la minute. The walls maroon from floor to wainscoting height, then mustard yellow to the drop ceiling, generic pressed cardboard tiles, the pigments rising  into dark, shadowy places.

The tile frames coated in dust clinging to grease, requiring a toothbrush, hot water, soap, kitchen towels, and copper scrubbers to clean, and they’ll do it.

The low boy’s flat stainless steel plane spreads out, large and unencumbered. Freshly cleaned before the dinner service.

A stroll on rubber mats, past the deep fry, into the other half of the kitchen, where prep cooks talk parallel parking in cool luxury, before exiting through the wide grey metal door opening up to the alley drive for taking product deliveries.

Across the way, paved, though still only a driveway, is a creek, which runs year round, and in spring flows heavy, running on a slant into the horizon from a rare patch of forested wetlands in suburban frame, pressed into a proxy channel behind the mall. Wild growth and branches, buds, huddle the lines the eye seeks, and a quip of wilderness landscape unfolds with Canadian geese nesting and Mallards nearby.

Chef rips a piece of stale bread into pieces and tosses them at the nesting birds.

“U know dat nigga’s gettin old, cuz he’s feeding the birds!” K., shouts at Chef, guffawing.

Chef hears him, but he thinks about his Dad, his Grandmother when they would fish and feed the ducks and he was a boy wanting little more than to run. But he was distracted by something gnawing at him, even then, at that age. The imbalance. 

Here, he looked into the water, gurgling and rushing over stones, slowed in deep pools and languishing near the shore. The algae, like the scum atop stocks, and visible in the deeper water,  fearless suckers, chubs. 

No place for the predators, their majestic reign long ended.

Now there are just fat fish clinging to the bottom of these pools, in eddy’s calm, resting, darting about and feeding on waste.

Everybody gives up something to G-d.

The best is to give up fear

while time runs like currents over rock;

our moment,

bubbles’

glisten in harbor waters.

You are true

against gravity, or terms

unkind

and unjust,

until compromise becomes necessary,

and your gift is lost, removed in failure

from the muted,

the beaten down, those who needed you,

stricken in that

great war

where men line up, felled rather than run,

their foes in momentary anger, push to break the line. 

Who can blame the broken for their hurt, the once loved for 

their anguish?

Resolve finally my brothers,

not so long ago strangers,

having now shared water and breath,

into wholesome union.