Musa Paradisiaca
by Matthew Ulland
Tonight, Santos fries plantains,
peels thick green skin, the fruit
mashed flat and mixed with crescent
garlic moons, sizzled to discs.
He adds and subtracts, fills the sink’s
basin with what we don’t consume—
ends of things that slip from hands
—sopping weighty globs. In Cuba
his mother fried plantains before
The Party inventoried possessions.
Loyalists spat and jeered as they strode
like deposed aristocrats to the plane,
to markets and property. He fries them in
New York, follows her recipe, adds salt.
Matthew Ulland’s poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MiPOesias, Illuminations, Coe Review, The Meadowland Review, Border Crossing, LIT, caesura, Hanging Loose, and other journals. He is the author of the chapbook, “The Sound in the Corn,” and of the novel, The Broken World.
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