–for Belle Yang
In the gilded bowl your mother sent from China,
you arrange two pounds of lychee–
strawberry-red, rose-colored, amber-yellow,
all aromatic and heart-shaped,
a bowlful of edible jewels.
You place one in your palm, pinch
the peel, and release the aphrodisiac, lift
the fleshy aril from the seed, roll it
like a luscious grape across your tongue,
then squish.
Your new friends try the lychee,
and spit it out, this favorite fruit of Asian women-
and Yang Yuhuan,
the Emperor’s favorite concubine, kept by her bed
such a bowl of desire.
These American women want chocolate-
milk, dark, and bittersweet.
And now you wrinkle your nose.
Belle, your fruit is delicious but chocolate, too,
and because I want to mediate this cultural divide,
I offer you chocolate, hold it out as a soldier does
to a child in the streets of a foreign land.
Here, smell the melted butter, hint of vanilla,
boiling sugar. Learn to love what is decadent,
what grows in other gardens.
Breathe the ghost of cacao tree.
Imagine the thick syrup and the bright red cherry
tucked like a gemstone inside.
Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, What Feeds Us, which received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, Eve’s Red Dress, and, most recently, Temptation by Water. Her poems have been included in such anthologies as Poetry Daily: 360 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times and in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac.
*Photo courtesy of QuintanaRoo.