As
usual, journalists do what Big Business won’t.
Chirography
in soil: I am only 15.
Since
two-thirds of the world’s cocoa
is
produced by the hands of two million West African children,
and
after twenty years the corporations can’t keep the pledge to
eradicate child labor,
chocolates
should come wrapped in tattered rags.
Those
of us who eat it should be compelled to drink water
that
looks like milk
out
of a dirty bucket.
All
chocolate should be white like the cocoa beans it comes from.
It
doesn’t deserve the beauty of brown.
Chocolates
should taste like
the
sour salt of sweat,
the
tears of boys that miss their mothers, fathers, villages, and
home-cooked meals,
the
dirt embedded underneath their fingernails and in their second-hand
clothes,
the
blood that oozes when they cut themselves.
Hands
that should be holding pencils and books
clench
knives to cut open cocoa pods,
swing
machetes against tall grasses to clear the land.
They
fall asleep to the rhythm of back spasms.
For
Mars
Nestle
Hershey
Godiva
to
make suffering sweet,
in
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Belize,
children
join their parents in the fields,
blistered
hand in blistered hand,
risking
dehydration, heat stress, chronic kidney disease.
How
many more will wave,
yell
Mwen Byen as they leave Haiti
for
12-hour days in the bayetes of the Dominican Republic.
No
electricity,
running
water,
indoor
toilets.
The
bending and rising at the waist,
the
swish and clang of machete against cane,
from
the wax, to the wane of the sun.
Safe
from the loss of lus soli.
Mwen
Byen.
Copyright
© Carla Cherry 2019
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
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Carla M. Cherry is an English teacher from New York. Her poems have appeared in Anderbo, Eunoia Review, Dissident Voice, Random Sample Review, MemoryHouse Magazine, Bop Dead City, Down in the Dirt, In Between Hangovers, Firefly Magazine, Picaroon Poetry, Streetlight Press, Ariel Chart, Culture Cult Magazine, Hollow, Synaeresis, Interstice, Terra Preta Review, and Maximum Tilt. She has published four books of poetry through Wasteland Press: Gnat Feathers and Butterfly Wings (2008), Thirty Dollars and a Bowl of Soup (2017), Honeysuckle Me (2017), and These Pearls Are Real (2018).
