The Amish farmers have staged a coup
at the open-air market on the square,
setting up their wares in protest
on card tables in the dollar store
parking lot across the street because
the ego-tripped organizer was forcing them
to buy their own insurance.

Our next-door neighbor Bob laments
that he can’t find good DVDs anywhere
since the video store became a dollar store,
films must be mail-ordered from his “guy in Chicago”
because Bob doesn’t use the internet. (Sometimes
the dollar store sells discs, he says, but none of them
are really any good.) You wouldn’t know it

from his righteous anger about the state
of politics and rejection of religion, but
Bob watches Ben-Hur almost every week,
the only movie, he mentions, he ever saw
in the theater with his father.

We tell him Jade has harvested twenty-seven
volunteer squash from our backyard
though we didn’t do much to the garden this year,
both of us so busy working. They volunteered
themselves from our compost pile, the vines
apparently from super-seeds of last year’s market
gourds set on our porch until they rotted through.

Our friends told us about the market drama
over rice and vegetables one evening
and I thought, Wow, we live in a small town,
then egged on the rest of the story.

Bob reminds us that anything you need to know,
you can ask one of the shopkeepers, the people
at the newsstand he visits every day, or the bookstore
with dead plants in the windows that somehow stays
open, shelling out homemade chocolate chip cookies
to its regulars who arrive on foot and bicycle.
I didn’t think I’d ever live in corn country like this,
turning my head to the center of town
near enough to think about.

Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about history and place. She practices poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Freesia served as the Fall 2022 Poet in Residence at Ripon College. In 2023, she will begin working as an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Stevens Point. Read more at FreesiaMcKee.com.