100 Food poems

How well its square fit my palm, my mouth, a toasty wafer slipped onto the sick tongue or into chicken soup, each crisp saltine a tile pierced with 13 holes in rows of 3 and 2, its edges perforated like a postage stamp, one of a shifting stack sealed in wax paper whose noisy opening always signaled snack, peanut butter or cheese thick inside Premiums, the closest we ever got to serving hors d’oeuvres: the redneck’s hardtack, the cracker’s cracker.

A recipe for lamb tagine demands a mysterious ingredient: raz el hanout. Animal, vegetable, compound of kings like myrrh? I decide not to look it up, to wait and see. At first it is everything we seek but can’t express. Then it reverses: everything thrust upon us—think fast!— by the universe, like the leg my friend Tom caught when a cyclist got clipped by a car, the driver stinking drunk at 9:00 AM. Severed above the knee, the leg flung itself into the air, a javelin. Tom, always quick, reached up and caught it. But the story has a twist. After the cyclist died in an ambulance, the widow inexplicably came on to Tom. Not that Tom is unattractive. Indeed he is the sort of man I’d throw myself at if I were a leg. It’s hard to imagine the sex that Tom and this woman would have had there in the hotel room with the blackout curtains pulled. I’ve never had sex with Tom myself, but if I had been that leg or that woman I might have whispered, “What fine reflexes you have, Sir!” “Sir, say something tender!” “Cradle me against the guttural gasp from your solar plexus.” “Oh, Sir, I sense the tip of bone on skin, a surge of déjà vu.” “I am coming, I am about to come, your shuddering lover, your raz el hanout.”

Next  to white rice it looks like coral sitting next to snow Hills of starch border The burnt sienna of irony Azusenas being chased by the terra cotta feathers of a rooster There is a lava flow through the smoking white mounds India red spills on ivory Ochre cannon balls falling next to blanc pebbles Red beans and milk make burgundy wine Violet pouring from the eggshell tinge of the plate.

Teach me a fruit of  your country I asked and so you dipped into a shop and in your hand held me a thick yellow pinecone no knife between us you put it to your teeth sideways like a bird and bit and peeled away the fleshy scales or were they petals crisp white at the core peppered with black seeds sweet and light like a cold cloud like some exotic sherbet carried hand over hand from a mountaintop by a relay of runners straightway to the Inca’s high table we sat on metal chairs still pebbled with rain the seat of my pants damp we passed it back and forth no matter how carefully we could not help spilling the juice making our cheeks sticky our fingers getting sticky our fingers no not even once touching

Can’t stop eating you, movie-style extra butter microwave popcorn. Can’t stop watching you, rented movie about an immigrant family from Lebanon. Can't help but weep, seeing the family wave goodbye to relatives in the Beirut airport—tear salt mixing with popcorn salt. Can’t hide my mess, myself from the friend beside me. Can’t answer his question,Does it remind you of your family, leaving China? I want to say,No, it’s completely different, which in many ways it is, but really I’m remembering what a writer friend once said to me,All you write about is being gay or Chinese—how I can’t get over that, & wonder if it’s true, if everything I write is in some way an immigrant narrative or another coming out story. I recall a recent poem, featuring fishmongers in Seattle, & that makes me happy—clearly that one isn’t about being gay or Chinese. But then I remember a significant number of Chinese immigrants live in Seattle & how I found several of the Pike Place fishmongers attractive when I visited, so I guess that poem's about being gay & Chinese, too. So I say to my friend,I'm not sure,& keep eating the popcorn. Thank god we chose the giant “family size” bag. Can’t stop the greasy handfuls, noisy mouthfuls. Can’t eat popcorn quietly. Later, during my friend’s smoke break, still can’t come up with a worthy response to his radical queer critique of homonormativity, of monogamy, domesticity, front lawn glory.These middle-class gays picking out garden gnomes, ignoring all the anti-racist work of decolonization that still needs to be done—don’t you think they’re lame? I say,Yeah, for sure, but think, marriage, house, 1 kid, 2 cats—how long have I wanted that? Could I give that up in the name of being a real queer? Probably can’t. & it’s like another bad habit I can’t give up. Eating junk, can’t. Procrastinating, can’t. Picking scabs, can’t. Being friends with people who challenge my beliefs & life plans, can’t. Reading & believing in Ayn Rand, though? Can, Brief phase as a Christian because I liked the cross as an accessory? Can. WWJD? Can. White heterosexist patriarchy? Can. America . . . can’t. Can’t help but think, when we get back to the movie, how it was my father’s decision to move here, not my mother’s, just like the parents on screen. Can’t stop replaying my mother’s walk onto the plane, carrying me, though I was getting too old for it, holding me, my face pressed into her hair, her neck, as she cried, quietly—can’t stop returning to this scene of leaving, can’t stop pausing the scene, thinking I’ve left something out again, something else my mother told me. Like my grandmother at the airport, how she saw my small body so tied to my mother’s body, & still she doubted, she had to say,You better not lose him.& my mother kept that promise till she couldn’t, she lost me, in the new country, but doesn’t that happen to all parents & their children, one way or another, & don’t we need to get lost? Lost, dizzy, stubbly, warm, stumbling, whoa—that’s what it felt like, 17, kissing a boy for the first time. Can’t forget it. Can’t forget when my mother found out & said, This would never have happened if we hadn’t come to this country. But it would’ve happened, every bit as dizzy, lost, back in China. It didn’t happen because of America, dirty Americans. It was me, my need. My father said,You have to change, but I couldn’t, can’t give you up, boys & heat, scruff & sweet. Can’t get over you. Trying to get over what my writer friend said,All you write about is being gay or Chinese. Wish I had thought to say to him,All you write about is being white or an asshole. Wish I had said,No, I already write about everything— & everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair, carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn, mothers, bad habits, questions.

As I walked up the Rue des Martyrs with my bag of small, perfect, waxy potatoes I doffed my imaginary hat to Monsieur Parmentier. Well, I do have a hat and wore it a lot not so long ago to cover a healing wound on my forehead but this wasn’t necessary anymore, and anyway the hat wasn’t with me now in Paris. Nor was Monsieur Parmentier, though any remains of him lie in a plot in Père Lachaise ringed by potato plants. I would not be intending to cook my potatoes if not for the duplicitous actions of Parmentier back in the late years of the 18th century. After he’d realized that this odd-shaped tuber looted from the Incas in Peru (along with their gold and silver) was extremely nutritious, and no one would believe him, he’d come up with a ruse. Using money given to him by King Louis XVI, he purchased a plot of impoverished ground outside Paris, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and planted it with potatoes. When the time to dig them came, he built a fence around them and put armed guards outside it. These men wore uniforms the color of potatoes. They were told to leak the news that they were guarding an extremely precious food. Then, one night, they left their post. Thieves arrived within a couple of hours and stole the entire crop. Over the next few days the potatoes were sold in the city’s markets as the food of kings. So my guests wouldn’t know they would be eating the food of kings. Nor would I tell them, though I might well concoct a story about the breed of pigs their pork chops had come from. And the posh wine that had yielded the wine vinegar I’d used in the salad dressing. I could try telling them I’d climbed over the fence of Père Lachaise the previous night, armed with a phone-torch, a troweling spade, and a canvas bag, and dug the potatoes from Monsieur Parmentier’s plot — only taking the small ones that were right for pommes sautées, of course — but I know they wouldn’t believe me. I was distracted from these smug reveries by my mobile phone ringing. I dug it out of my pocket and answered it, thinking one advantage of being in France was that nobody rang me. The voice at the other end was not one I recognized. It said, at first quietly, “Are you OK?” then in a louder voice, “Please tell me you’re OK over there,” and that was it. When I went to check the number, it had been withheld. What had I landed myself in, I wondered? I went home to deal with my 19th-century French meal.

I set up my computer and webcam in the kitchen so I can ask my mother’s and aunt’s advice as I cook soup for the first time alone. My mother is in Utah. My aunt is in Hungary. I show the onions to my mother with the webcam. “Cut them smaller,” she advises. “You only need a taste.” I chop potatoes as the onions fry in my pan. When I say I have no paprika to add to the broth, they argue whether it can be called potato soup. My mother says it will be white potato soup, my aunt says potato soup must be red. When I add sliced peppers, I ask many times if I should put the water in now, but they both say to wait until I add the potatoes. I add Polish sausage because I can’t find Hungarian, and I cook it so long the potatoes fall apart. “You’ve made stew,” my mother says when I hold up the whole pot to the camera. They laugh and say I must get married soon. I turn off the computer and eat alone.

—how her loose curls float above each silver fish as she leans in to pluck its eyes— You died just hours ago. Not suddenly, no. You'd been dying so long nothing looked like itself: from your window, fishermen swirled sequins; fishnets entangled the moon. Now the dark rain looks like dark rain. Only the wine shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses and we raise a toast to you as so and so's daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow— slides into another lap to eat another pair of slippery eyes with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time, for being chewed a little. If only I could go to you, revive you. You must be a little alive still. I'd like to put this girl in your lap. She's almost feverishly warm and she weighs hardly anything. I want to show you how she relishes each eye, to show you her greed for them. She is placing one on her tongue, bright as a polished coin— What do they taste like? I ask. Twisting in my lap, she leans back sleepily. They taste like eyes, she says.

Miracle fruit changes the tongue. One bite, and for hours all you eat is sweet. Placed alone on a saucer, it quivers like it's cold from the ceramic, even in this Florida heat. Small as a coffee bean, red as jam— I can't believe. The man who sold it to my father on Interstate 542 had one tooth, one sandal, and called me "Duttah, Duttah." I wanted to ask what is that, but the red buds teased me into our car and away from his fruit stand. One bite. And if you eat it whole, it softens and swells your teeth like a mouthful of mallow. So how long before you lose a sandal and still walk? How long before you lose the sweetness?

The orange-peelers of Mérida, in the wrought- iron midday, come with mechanical skewers and live oranges, to straddle the paths on caissons of bicycle wheels and work in the dark of the plaza, like jewelers’ cloths. The orange is ceremonious. Its sleep is Egyptian. Its golden umbilicus waits in pyramidal light, swath over swath, outwitting the Caesars. It cannot be ravaged by knives, but clasps its mortality in, like the skein of an asp. The bandstand glitters like bone, in laurel and spittle. Behind their triangular catafalques, the orange-peelers move through the thirst of the world with Rameses’ bounty caulked into the hive of the peel while ratchets and wheels spin a blazing cosmology on their little machines. Under skewers and handles, the orange’s skin is pierced, the orange, in chain-mail and papyrus, unwinds the graveclothes of Pharaoh in a helix of ribbon, unflawed, from the navel’s knot to the rind and the pulp underneath, like a butterfly’s chrysalis. And sleeper by sleeper, the living turn with their thirst to each other, the orange’s pith is broken in a blind effervescence that perfumes the palate and burns to the tooth’s bite. And the dead reawaken.