BIO
M.C. Zendejas is a writer, organizer and educator from Houston, Texas. He is an inaugural fellow in the Emerging Writers Fellowship given by Writers in the Schools (WITS). You may find his work featured in BULL: Men's Fiction, Drunk Monkeys Literature + Film, Z Publishing's anthology: Texas's Best Emerging Writers, UNDERGROUND Journal, Five2One Magazine, Your Impossible Voice, X-R-A-Y Magazine and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, Swimming Through the Void, was published in early 2019.
Non Fiction Prose Poem 2
The average strawberry weighs 12g, about 200 seeds covering
smooth crimson.
A common pesticide used on them is Chloropicrin. If inhaled,
side effects include:
coughing
choking,
so you can’t speak up,
headaches
dizziness,
so your world twists and
upends,
sometimes evaporates.
Blue dis-
-colored skin
instead of orange jumpsuits
Death.
But not the sudden violent kind that spark revolutions; the
slow kind, where
everyone pretends they don’t notice because it’s less glittery
than foreign “dictators.”
Food advocates oppose Chloropicrin
for consumer health.
Community organizers demand a buffer be placed
between where workers spray it and where gated lawns are
tucked into suburbs, buttoned with electric cars—
some buffer proposals being several thousand feet.
But no one mentions the workers, almost voiceless from the
choking, and choking on so much
hunching,
coffee skin
leathery beneath
sun’s scowl.
“So that the strawberry eaters may live”
But they are not voiceless.
Hear them cry out when
hurt, or
chuckle when tickled.
Hear them chanting,
marching, see
signs spelling out
demands, and know the true
face of Tomorrow.