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EBB I The towel blooms and withers, blooms and withers in her hands, as she wipes the last table in the restaurant. An abandoned cocktail grows water from its ice. The smell & spillage & dirty dishes linger like silent laughter after the diners have left. Earlier, staff moved about sunburned tourists, order after order, in and out of the swinging kitchen doors - a rhythm of service that unsettled. I watch their movements thicken with fatigue, and no worksong, not even a pitjay for them to sing. I want to show them my heart softened with the moss of sympathy, like a ruined wall at Pigeon Point. So soon after. I want them to hear the chains, the cutlery of empire that I hear; to show them the deep history of the tourist pocket. I finish what is on my plate and think of how, once more, I must walk the beach alone, gathering shells, stones, the sea's coral-bones grumbling under my feet, crunching and growing into a sedimentary grudge, a gradual bucket of rage. She wipes the last table - mine; her fingers splayed like roots. I pick up my dread and walk.  
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