Fried
—after Kevin Young and Kimberly Grabowski Strayer
1.
Seattle, summer,
75 and sunny,
Mom has sent you
out to play
with Mook and Ronk.
The golden rule:
Give her the day
as she gave you life;
don’t come back
until dinner
and when you do
get back,
keep your skinny butt
out of her kitchen.
Sweat has already
taken hold of her hair.
Roots nappy as yours,
best not try traverse them.
I don’t care
if you’re thirsty.
I don’t need more bodies
in this hot kitchen.
But you can’t help it.
Your ears sizzle
to the tune
of that crackling oil,
sweeter than any siren’s song,
more earthy, more blues,
like normalcy with big
punctuation marks
of struggle and there it is,
golden brown,
perfectly crispy
like the smack
upside your head
Mom gives you,
the jolt crackling
like oil in the pan.
2.
Mornings away
are cold,
the nights
colder,
though warmed
by mofongo:
slices
of plátano
fried golden,
then mashed with
chicharrón and garlic
under a pestle’s weight.
The action
is listless—
no, it’s persistent,
insistent on binding
as much as breaking.
Like the boleros,
tales of heartbreak
Dad boomed
from any CD player
harder than his machismo,
his bravado, his
¡ahí-ahí!
This was meant
to bind him to Mom,
demonstration that he is not
just sharp salsa,
that even the greenest plátano
can be broken down.
You exist only
in front of them.
That is,
these sliced-up plátanos
(nose sparking
to the garlic of this grind,
the crackle of wood-
smashed chicharrón),
but maybe also
those boleros,
Ismael and Celia and Cheo
grinding your soul
under the weight
of their voices,
Cheo, especially,
voice a croon stretching notes
over drums and maracas
that crackle like oil.
3.
Maybe you belong to both.
Maybe mofongo
is fried chicken,
the rhythm
of light and dark
and oil,
the rhythm
of crackle—
Cheo’s voice
is Mom’s hand
upside your head
is chicharrón.
Platános exist
to be fried.
Chicken exists
to be fried.
You exist
in front of them.
You that oil.
You make it all crackle.
Malcolm Friend is a poet originally from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. He received his BA from Vanderbilt University, where he was the 2014 recipient of the Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry, and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of the chapbooks mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and Case Study on the Afro-Seattleite (e-chapbook, forthcoming, Radical Narratives), and has received awards and fellowships from organizations including CantoMundo, VONA/Voices of Our Nations, Backbone Press, the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics, and the University of Memphis. His manuscript Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple won the 2017 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and will be published by Inlandia Books in 2018. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including La Respuesta magazine, the Fjords Review’s Black American Edition, Vinyl, Word Riot, The Acentos Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, and Pretty Owl Poetry. He currently serves as a Poetry Editor for FreezeRay Poetry.
2 Comments