most people call them peanuts
eat them salted or roasted
with a cold beer
or a glass of Chablis

but not you

I’d never met a nut trader before
never considered the job

you called them groundnut kernels
like fossils
like tiny samples
pulled from dirt and catalogued

I saw warehouses
pallets stacked to the rafters
forklifts nosing between aisles
steel mandibles lifting weight after weight

you spoke in shipments and margins
I heard the rake in red soil
saw the flash of kneecaps
below the hemline

a hand in the dust
lifting a shell
cracking it
finding
two pale halves inside