Serving Oysters to M.F.K Fisher
“All the Filipino servants, pretty little men-dolls as mercurial as monkeys, and as lewd.”
-M.F.K Fisher, American food writer, 1924, The First Oyster
We slide past the wooden crates stained with salt, crowding the service entrance.
We pry open the question of lids: slippers of oysters waiting for a tongue to kiss.
We freeze our hands scrubbing their algaed coats, pristine from the thickness of our bristles.
We mimic the Pacific's sharp bite and overtake, salt shaking free from our hands.
We shuck and snap with our pointed knives, unlock, twist the collection of God's gnarled doors.
We cut the muscle under the shell, inhale the liquor we can't drink.
We serve gloved young women waltzing, oyster in one hand, the other on wide shoulders.
We remember our first oysters grown on the ghosts of coconuts, slithered in by submerged ropes.
We remember the quickburn of rum to chase these heartbeats of ocean, brining our bodies, cruel.
—RACHELLE CRUZ
-M.F.K Fisher, American food writer, 1924, The First Oyster
We slide past the wooden crates stained with salt, crowding the service entrance.
We pry open the question of lids: slippers of oysters waiting for a tongue to kiss.
We freeze our hands scrubbing their algaed coats, pristine from the thickness of our bristles.
We mimic the Pacific's sharp bite and overtake, salt shaking free from our hands.
We shuck and snap with our pointed knives, unlock, twist the collection of God's gnarled doors.
We cut the muscle under the shell, inhale the liquor we can't drink.
We serve gloved young women waltzing, oyster in one hand, the other on wide shoulders.
We remember our first oysters grown on the ghosts of coconuts, slithered in by submerged ropes.
We remember the quickburn of rum to chase these heartbeats of ocean, brining our bodies, cruel.
—RACHELLE CRUZ