by Lee Cooper
It was a good year for mangoes,
when we lived on rice, canned tuna,
Kool-Aid with too little sugar,
and the mangoes everyone gave us.
Like zucchini from gardens back home,
anyone with a tree would ask,
Can you use some mangoes? and we
always said Yes, peeling smooth green skin,
orange-yellow flesh clinging to the oval pit
no matter how close we cut it. Better than
peaches, sweet acid juice
sticking to our hands, burning our lips.
We ate mangoes with tuna and rice,
mangoes with Spam and rice,
mangoes fresh and dripping,
like a good gardener eats tomatoes.
I do not remember anyone giving us
bananas or papayas or guavas, only mangoes.
We picked plumeria from overgrown trees
at the corner of Piikoi and Beretania,
stringing leis of pink and yellow blossoms
pressed cool against bare sun-burned skin
in the long Honolulu nights, hot and sticky
as mango juice on tongues and fingertips.
Lee Cooper grew up among family and neighbors who worked in the automobile factories of southern Michigan. She has also lived in Hawaii, Montana, and Idaho, and currently lives in Red Lodge, Montana where she writes, skis, and hikes. Her poems come from all of these places.
Hawaii Pacific Review 