Eating the World

Ben Jacobs / V Mag at UVA

Summer was so slippery that year,

dark like an eel and oozing with sugar.

Kyoho grapes, fermented mad, are rotten-sweet, spoiled but coveted

like us, the American cousins,

who were impressed by the uncle

arriving on a motorcycle

with a watermelon that crackles when split,

its seeds big and earthy in our mouths. I

remember we practiced spitting them,

seeing whose could go furthest

into the yard with the banana tree and mosquitos,

now a five-story apartment.

One afternoon, sunbaked and tired,

we played cards and ate mangoes

as a thunderstorm combed through Taipei.

The rain is enormous!

You mean heavy? I replied,

but it was both – large and swallowing, weighted

and slamming, through diagonal winds I felt it

from the window screen,

specks tick onto my perspiring back,

my grandfather, who could not hear the rain,

swam in the oceaned air, reaching

for another Werther’s Original Caramel Candy

that my mother had stuffed into a suitcase, that

and bottles upon bottles of vitamins for her

mother who was slowly dying in the next

room, full of Buddha necklaces and the regret

of a daughter, who

now cries at steamed taro

because it was her favorite breakfast. I

was scared to admit that I hardly knew

my love’s greatest love.

Still, determined to eat the world away, I

swatted at a fly and returned to my mango,

its skin slinking apart as I leaned

over a plate to catch the heavy,

honeyed drips, my teeth youthful

and relentless.