What the Bread Cost

A narrative poem...

I paid twenty-five dollars to enter

and told myself it was enough,

a fair exchange,

a respectful transaction

between a visitor

and a place that has been here

longer than the word visitor

has existed in any language

spoken on this continent.

I was wrong about the twenty-five dollars.

The place knew it before I did.

---

The first women I met

were old in the way that certain people are old,

not diminished but concentrated,

everything unnecessary

burned away by decades

until what remained

was pure and specific and exact.

They cooked on a cast iron stove

in a room that smelled of smoke and cornmeal

and something older than both,

and they made fry bread with honey

and two peach pocket pies

and they asked me where I was from

and what I did

and seemed genuinely pleased

by both answers.

I ate the fry bread standing up.

Honey ran down my thumb.

I did not wipe it away immediately

because some things

deserve a moment

before you clean them up.

---

There was a gentleman

in a room hung with photographs

of himself with people I recognized

and money from countries I had never visited,

coins and bills pinned to the wall

like a map of everywhere

the world had found its way to him.

He told me the water running through Taos Pueblo

was at the lowest level

of his lifetime.

He said it the way people say things

they have said before

and have not yet found a way

to stop saying,

because the saying

is the only power left.

Construction, he said.

The water table.

The thirst of a growing world

drawing down what his world

had always believed was permanent.

I told him about Louisiana,

about the water table there,

about the weight of building

on land that is mostly water

pretending to be solid.

We talked about New Orleans

and he laughed

because he could never say it right

and had been corrected many times

and had not minded

because it was the kind of correction

that meant someone cared

whether you got it right.

Then he said:

I watched you.

He meant the bread.

The way I had come out of the next room

with the loaf still warm

and pressed my thumbs into it

the way you press into bread

when no one is watching,

checking for give,

checking for the particular resistance

of something made right.

He had been watching from his doorway

and it had delighted him,

this stranger from Louisiana

punching on the bread

of a woman who had made it

the way her mother made it

the way her grandmother made it

the way the women before her

had been making it

for longer than the United States

has been a country.

He told me this

and laughed

and I laughed

and for a moment

the water table and the construction

and the lowest level of his lifetime

receded slightly,

not gone,

but patient,

willing to wait

while two men laughed

about bread.

---

There were very few young people working.

I noticed this the way you notice

something you don’t want to notice,

the way the absence of a thing

can be louder than the thing itself.

Most of the people I spoke with

were in their sixties and seventies,

doing the work their parents had done,

keeping alive what their children

were increasingly not here to inherit.

I am a quasi-white person

from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana,

descended from people

who did not arrive on this continent

with clean hands,

and I felt the weight of that

in every room I entered,

not as guilt exactly,

which is too simple and too self-referential,

but as a kind of debt

that has no clear payment structure

and does not forgive itself

simply because you acknowledge it.

I spent more than I planned.

Not to discharge the debt.

You cannot discharge it.

But because it was something I could do,

and I had run out of reasons

not to do the things I could do.

I bought an arrowhead necklace

for a boy I love.

I bought blue corn sugar cookies

from a baker who wanted something sweet

in a landscape of savory.

I bought more fry bread at the exit,

one with honey,

one with powdered sugar,

because the first had been so good

and good things

do not always come back around

and I was learning,

slowly,

to stop saving the good things

for later.

---

The last person I spoke with

was an artist.

She worked in silver and clay and paint

and she had done the cover of a book

and she was talented in the way

that makes you want to apologize

for anything mediocre

you have ever produced,

and then make better things.

She signed a postcard for me.

She dated it.

She looked at me with the directness

of someone who has decided

to take people at face value

until proven otherwise,

and she said:

Use it in your travel essay.

I said I would.

I am.

---

I ate two more pieces of fry bread

on the way out.

Honey. Powdered sugar.

Juice on my hands again.

I did not wipe it away immediately.

I had not eaten meat in several days

and felt lighter than I expected.

The altitude was doing something

to my appetite,

or perhaps the altitude

was doing something

to my sense of what I actually needed,

which is a different thing entirely.

I drove back through Taos,

which felt like a Pueblo version of New Orleans,

beautiful and overwhelming,

a place to visit from wherever you live

rather than a place to live,

and I thought about the gentleman

and his photographs and his coins

and the lowest water level

of his lifetime.

I thought about the women

and the cast iron stove

and the honey running down my thumb.

I thought about the artist

and her directness

and the postcard in my bag

with her name on it

in her own handwriting,

dated the day I passed through,

July 11, 2026,

a year that will mean nothing

to the walls of Taos Pueblo,

which have been absorbing years

since before the concept of a year

was organized this way.

There is no returning

to the grandeur the Indigenous people

once held in this place.

You can see it in the rooms,

in the absence of young hands

doing the old work,

in the water running low

beneath the foundations

of a thousand years.

You can see it and you cannot fix it

and you cannot look away from it

and twenty-five dollars at the gate

is not enough

and neither is everything you have

but you give what you can

and you eat the bread

and you let the honey run

and you carry the names

of the people you met

and you write them down

and you tell the truth

about what the place cost you

which was more than you planned

which was exactly right

which was the least

it could have asked.

---

Taos Pueblo, New Mexico

July 11, 2026

Continuously inhabited for over a thousand years