Offal
Please put the hearts on a skewer—you can call them
an appetizer if you want to, charge me
more than they are worth. I’ll buy it.
I only have an appetite for what’s unwanted;
all the foods I grew up on now made gourmet.
It’s the fish collar I want, bony triangle of tender
tucked between the gills, a cheap throwaway
until you cook it over smoldering charcoal
watch the skin go crisp, lacquer it with dark sweet soy.
Don’t tell me not to eat with my fingers because of the stickiness,
this is not a fork and knife scenario
get your hands dirty, grab a fin like a handle.
I don’t mind a little bone; I bite through it,
the childhood fear I’d break my teeth,
or swallow a pin bone, but I did swallow, and lived,
but what a way to go, the marrow makes me work for it.
Fry livers with sumac and be excused if they do not
taste like my grandmother’s because nothing
is like that soup Aunt #7 made every Saturday, tomatoes swimming
in bobbing chicken necks, broth so murky with fat and scum
you know she skipped the skimming—what my mother
told you was laziness, I tasted as extravagance.
My love told me he couldn’t watch me eat gizzards,
(“too gruesome”) so I gave him my best toothy smile:
fuck the snow pea leaves, the spinach too,
the veggies trying to hide what I want most.
Fry, boil, grill, raw and rawer still—however you make it, make it hard
to go down, impossible for anyone but me to stomach.
I need to eat all the insides today, so give me gristle, something
real to chew on, something only I can love.
Thu Anh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American poet whose poetry has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, The Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Curator Magazine, Zoetic Press’ Heathentide Orphans, The BIPOC Issue of Wingless Dreamer, NPR’s “Social Distance” poem for the community, The Salt River Review, and 3Elements. Her poem “Symbols Are Not Excuses” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and the Best of the Net by the Southern Humanities Review. The author’s poems were also named as a semi-finalist for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize for the Southern Humanities Review. She was honored with a writing residency with The Inner Loop Poetry Series in Washington, D.C. Her most recent book review and personal essay was published by Soapberry Review.
