"Farmers’ Market" by Luís Costa

instead of allowing myself to be happy I keep trying

to find you exploring the tight curves of bell peppers,

your laugh echoing within the crunch of sourdoughs,

a smile lingering as the sharpness of sheep’s cheese,

hiding melancholia inside green olives’ salty brines,

ghosts tucked so tightly in the shadows of fig leaves,

hesitantly pacing between the honeys and the jams,

lavender bunches chosen to mask a grey loneliness.

I used to love you on Saturday mornings – now I go

to the farmers’ market and pretend you’re still around.

Luís Costa (he/they) is an anxious queer poet, whose debut book Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat is forthcoming with Fourteen Poems in November 2023. His poems have featured in Visual Verse, Stone of Madness, Queerlings, Inksounds, Farside Review and FEED, and are forthcoming in Anthropocene and Passengers Journal. Long-listed for the Out-Spoken Poetry Prize in 2022, he holds a PhD from Goldsmiths and lives in London with his cat Pierożek. You can find him on Twitter @captainiberia