Food and Beverage: Two Poems by Joshua Nguyen

American Lục Bát For The Thịt Kho I Make For My Loved Ones

Here, I say I love you:
show you the pork I use— kept cold
overnight. You say ode
to this cook, & behold the pan
that will feed us for ten
evenings while we lend each other
books so we can unearth
what it means to be hurled into
a fuller being. Who
do you think you are? You snapped on
this dish!

#6305-A:
two salt-eyed students
write their dreams within
the same walls. Guts empty, waiting
for stipends to come in.
The messy left end of the couch:
receipts of Cookout fries
from Friday night, book prize guidelines,
& one, single, dry rind
from a small, putrefied orange.

This dish: my mom’s
taunts that soft-hums against dark
brown stomach-growls.

Bless the catch,
the wind & net which flap
like the cardinal at our open
window. The chorus in
our laughter: this meal in which
we share together.

About Joshua Nguyen

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University.