măng cụt | mangosteen

have you ever eaten a mangosteen?
deep purple jewels
with thick rinds
and creamy, pale white flesh for fruit.
they are a finicky breed—
buy a whole kilo,
and half of them may be rotten.
the good ones are near impossible to find,
but the half that are good?
are gentle and tart,
they yield their sweetness without the slightest
of your pleading.

in Vietnamese, we don’t ask if you’ve ever eaten something;
we ask if you know how to eat it.
măng cụt
có biết ăn không?
you must know its contours
before you can declare you don’t like it.

have you ever known a mangosteen?
they taste the way the dust would settle
as we pulled off the highway from Sài Gòn
and made our way to grandma’s house
while twilight broke into dawn.

when i flew across the pacific for the first time,
Má told me that even though the communists changed
all the street names,
there were some things she still recognized.
like the high school where she always ranked
first in class,
or the clamor of the market
from fishermen returning home with their catch.
i like to think she remembers this sweetness,
too.

have you ever known the shade of purple
that stains your hands
when you crack open a mangosteen?
it is unrelenting and stubborn,
the way they paint your fingertips with bruises.
it is like they know with tenderness,
comes the risk of blood.

this is the only way i can remember how to savor
tang and memory.
i miss them so.
i miss them very much so.