Too many mangoes
My neighbor keeps giving us mangoes.
Every morning she knocks and drops
a plastic bag of half-rotten mangoes by the door.
This morning, the Supreme Court overturned
Roe v. Wade. All we can do is get together
at a park in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Chant.
Mango season is the best season. I’m overwhelmed
by mangoes. Another bag this morning. I eat
the not-quite-liquid mangoes with my hands, over the sink.
My friend and I want to buy guns. It’s a joke at first,
then we start looking at prices. All we can do
is arm ourselves, throw bricks through courthouse windows.
I see my neighbor walking the streets, rushing lawns
with mango trees. She loads her little cart with
stolen fruits, if fruit can be stolen, which perhaps it can’t.
Fruit is only, always, given. My neighbor’s son died last year.
He was forty and lived somewhere far away.
She needs to feed us until her back hurts.
There isn’t a safe way to go about it. All the ways
involve shares of blood. Depends on whose blood.
Whose blood makes the difference.
My neighbor’s sister died in Ukraine when the fighting began.
Shelled in her apartment. She keeps bringing
mangoes. My home is entirely mangoes. Rotting
but sweet enough to attract a universe of flies.
Rum Punch
Tonight, I decide to make a rum punch.
It’s summer. We’ve waited too long.
Scour the fridge for that pineapple juice
my neighbor gave me months ago.
I remember my first taste of real deal
fresh pineapple, from a guy’s cart
in Champasak Province, Laos. He cut it,
put it in a plastic baggie, acted as though
it was nothing, this ambrosia, this absurd
flavor. I had eaten pineapple before,
on Christmas Day, a little treat, the oversized
imported things that never quite ripened.
The guy’s pineapple blew my mind, made me
question if I had ever tasted. If everything
before was a facsimile of fruit.
I got mangoes too, because it’s mango
season and all the perfect ones fall
to the ground, a heavy sugared sunny
hailstorm. And the rum, the rum Max left
last year that I haven’t gotten to yet
because, honestly, I don’t like rum.
I like the idea of rum, the islandness of it.
In Puerto Rico I tasted the good stuff
I could afford and I thought for a moment:
I might become a “rum guy.” My whole life
I’ve sought the status of _____ guy–
that pseudo-expert friend who makes
obscure recommendations from honest questions.
Coffee guy, bread guy, whiskey guy,
olive oil guy, hot pepper guy. Name a type of guy
and secretly I’ve wanted to be him.
I suppose I have always needed an object
to lay my worries on, a thing I can singularly
possess without reservations or compromises.
Never had it. I was too worried about
global food supplies and water shortages,
the capacity of one universe to cradle these
anxieties but still deliver grace and joy.
The rum punch is fantastic tonight. I empty
what’s left of Max’s rum into my seventh glass.
Gorgeous glass. Glass mined from the sand,
millions of years of the sea’s slow annihilation
of beach stone. This life could have been much easier.
Could have been something to hold onto.
Instead, each of us are islands without rum
or pineapple or mango or ice. Goddamnit,
we are out of ice.
Brendan Walsh has lived and taught in South Korea, Laos, and South Florida. His work has appeared in Rattle, Glass Poetry, American Literary Review, Maine Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and other journals. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including his latest collection, 'concussion fragment', released in February 2022. He is co-host of the Fat Guy, Jacked Guy podcast with Stef Rubino. He's online at brendanwalshpoetry.com.