Foodsafe

If the doubling time of bacteria spores on white rice
left idling in the cooker is twenty minutes, then I’m a mother

of trillions, rebred every night at the dinner table
with meat velveted so tender nobody

knows the internal temperature
because “thermometers are for white people.”

My tongue whets for the salt sweet linger
of weeks-old stock, umami boiled soybean dark

in the belly of an earth-clay pot. These are the things I love.
The crumbling yolk of a third day tea egg from the bamboo basket,

snow mushroom wisps drowned in rock sugar syrup
like ghosts of who we were in that wide, wide ocean.

But in high school I buttercreamed cakes and roasted hollow chickens
and was taught the fridge as sacred—stainless steel utopia

with a two hour entry limit where stragglers are tossed overboard
just to be safe, the compost plumps with over-sharpened cheese,

whey-wet yogurt best before the weekend, the end pieces of bread
left until fungus buds gorge themselves green.

Last year, the white boy I dated flew to Singapore and saw
mostly the toilet. His stomach is weak, māma laughs. Stuffed

with the privilege of leaving flesh on drumstick bones
when bàba has to find the discount corner in supermarkets.

He rescues the rejects, the intestines, livers, and kidneys
crosshatched into flowers for his oil flame wok,

every organ unfurls in five-spice like it remembers
living. And I promise you this: around our table

we bite bones so clean we could build
a paddle, a raft sinewed blood-tight, we waste nothing

because we have had nothing. Our fingers pressed bladeside,
we scrape mold crusts until we find unscarred flesh

and trust the fire to kill enough for our bodies to do
what they have done for dynasties. Every mouthful

a remembrance. Every swallow, resilience.