By Jenna Le
i.m. Anthony Bourdain
Delicious dumpling: lunula, white-lipped,
pink-bellied from a grilled shrimp’s fetal curl
glimpsed through a tapioca cuticle
that coquettishly resists brash molars, sopped
in lime-dashed sauce of anchovies and topped
with minced green onions…. It’s a miracle
to watch you sit halfway around the world
eating this Central Vietnamese snack dropped
from lauded cookbooks whose authors wrongly thought
it not worth mentioning: too tough to chew,
perhaps, or else too tough to make, the gluey
texture requiring fingers strongly knotted
to pinch its lumpen whiteness into shape,
to knead its stubborn whiteness into crepe.
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) authored Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry appears in AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.