Eating at the Fancy Shanghai Restaurant

we go into because we are foreign, and there is everything left.
we’ve walked the streets: pomegranates, candied apples on
sticks, fish heads cut into blocks and sold, their jelly eyes
lifted toward our bellies. we’ve walked the indoor markets,
too: touched kites, their knotted strings. toy planes that brandish
their luminous wings. we see skinny insects chirping inside
cages and do not release them with our money, which could
buy a whole well here, a merchant calls out. which could buy
a whole horse here, if we wanted to. we don’t want to.