The Westside Provisions Food Hall

Lyrics

Six forty-five on a Friday.
Clerestory windows throw long bars of June light.
Across the marble, across the stainless steel.
Seventy-two degrees inside. Eighty-eight and humid on Howell Mill.

The shucker's knife finds the hinge. A quick, wet pop.
He lays it on the crushed ice bed.
Next to the lemon wedge, next to the little fork.
The smell of brine and yeast from the bakery ovens.
Up in the rafters, the old steel beams hold the quiet weight of the new roof.
This brick box used to hold textiles, not tasting menus.
Bales of cotton, maybe. Crates of something manufactured and shipped.

A different kind of provision now.
From loading dock to oyster bar.
They converted the inventory, they polished the floor.
The city eats its own history, and asks for more.

Anne and Clifford brought their knives here in 2012.
Left Buckhead for the authenticity of the warehouse district.
And the district followed.
I see the butcher counter, the cheese case, the stacks of wine.
A whole ecosystem under one corrugated ceiling. A performance of commerce.
A cathedral of appetite where the forklifts used to whine and reverse-beep.

A different kind of provision now.
From loading dock to oyster bar.
They converted the inventory, they polished the floor.
The city eats its own history, and asks for more.

I asked the city archivist for the manifests.
No names of the men who kept this place from falling in on itself in the nineties.
Just corporate ledgers. Distribution firms.
No record of the day laborers, the Spanish-speaking ghosts
who patched the roof before the tasting menus came.
Their work is the foundation. Their names are the empty space on the wine list.

I lift the shell.
The cold brine hits my tongue.
A taste of the ocean, a thousand miles from the coast.
Served in a warehouse, on a forgotten ghost's watch.
Delicious.