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Literature, PoetryMay 24, 2017

Of Persimmons

Sabaku by Farooq Mustafa. Artwork courtesy ArtChowk the Gallery.

My beloved brought me a basket of Hachiya persimmons, orange-red and glowing.
I’d never seen anything like it before: they were nothing like the Fuyu persimmons

my mother carried home in crates from the Korean market. Those had sat short
and squat like heirloom tomatoes burning bright on our kitchen countertop, against

my mother’s powdered skin, the snow of January. When sliced, a dark vermillion
emerged and we swallowed flame after flame, our throats ablaze. Trái hồng,

as she called them, are anything but hồng: anything but pink like the inside of my mother’s
mouth, her stroke of blush. I didn’t understand how the name could apply to the fruit

smoldering in front of me, couldn’t even pronounce it then: call it what it wasn’t.
The ones my beloved bore were thinner and elongated, reminiscent of large acorns,

and I imagined him scrounging on hands and knees to pick each fallen acorn
from beneath the neighbor’s tree. In its shade, we bit into the Hachiyas too early,

when they were still hard in our hands, and almost choked as we tried to swallow
cotton, the moisture in our mouths vanished. My mother called the Fuyus of my childhood

hồng cứng: hard pinks and these Hachiya persimmons hồng mềm: soft pinks
because they were not fully ripe unless they sagged like jelly in our hands, threatening

to burst from a mosquito bite or the nick of a nail. So I waited a week, placed the soft
pink on my windowsill and watched as its insides started to pull away from its skin, finally

cutting into it with a spoon, bringing its jellied center to my lips where I could have mistaken
the soft pink in my mouth as rotten, my tongue turning to velvet.

~ Susan Nguyen

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives in the desert where she is at work on her MFA in poetry at Arizona State University. Her previous work has appeared in PANK, diode, Boxcar Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

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Farooq MustafaPoem of the WeekpoetrySusan Nguyen

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Greetings from the future!

 

With COVID-19 taking the world by storm and news channels everywhere hitting us with waves of negativity, we at The Missing Slate recognize the importance of creativity and the arts, especially their impact on mental health. As the world sits indoors and in some areas, cautiously starts to re-enter life, they do so knowing that things might never go completely back to “normal”. That “normal” is the watchword.

 

Over the coming weeks, long-time readers will notice things starting to change as the magazine pivots focus and direction. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we can say only that we’re coming back. That we’ve been hibernating for long enough and that the world needs some positivity and reasons to hope amidst all the doom and gloom.

 

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