Green dye soils floors, grows viscous, ugly, feeding vegetal shift bosses who see through Mammon's jealous eyes. I ask my companion as we set to work. Our call and response never changes, as if these strange yet familiar cadences could somehow quicken the slowly ripening clock. Kykeo and I have spent five years together stooping in the fields of this factory. Silkscreeners we till with wood and rubber plowing green, pestilent ink through mesh which is not silk.
Lies pay our bills truth sets no one free.
Sometimes, out of nowhere he stills, distance growing in his eyes. Vietnam is code for daydream, portable vision of deciduous Paradise. He came here after Saigon, bringing green cards, an infant daughter, a wife who would soon bear a son. Roots pulled by Ho Chi Minh's communists, he spends lunches studying for citizenship tests, absently swallowing rice and tea water. We pick up our checks, punch out as second shift punches in.