To all the Unclean Foods in the Wok of My Poetry

To learn a language requires submission to a people. — Dr. Willie James Jennings

Which ingredients
are ready for me
were I to cook
this poem at high heat?
For decades, I’ve seasoned
my life with Paul.
After all, the epistles
are my mother tongue
even if our gas
stove heated dishes
like lomo saltado,
which requires that every
ingredient be prepped, chopped
& seated at the right
hand of the wok. If not,
a stir fry becomes
sancochado

& in Chinese-Peruvian
cuisine, you make one dish
at a time—no crock
pot & no big batch, no jumbo
& no bulk. Every plate
is a poem & the best salt
of the earth is made in Canton,
by which I mean sillao
which is the word for soy
sauce in Peru, since many Chinese
indentured servants & doctors
& herbalists
crossed the blues
of the Pacific, boats
sardined full of different palates,
& these diasporic peoples
are family. When my father
was a boy, the Sasieta Li
nourished their bones
with this fusion cuisine,
which apostles such as Peter
deemed unclean, & so yes, I mix
their words into the wok
of my poetry: the bitterness
& gall of kion, the aforementioned sillao
of the earth, the innumerable greens,
found not in Eden
but in the rural fields
of Chat Po, on the outskirts
of Hong Kong,
where my bisabuelo
left his family
for Lima

& not so long ago,
I, too, was a boy, peering
over my papi’s shoulder
as he splashed
a few drops
of water onto the flat
bottom of the wok.
Testing the heat,
he invoked the grandfather
whom he never met,
& then spoke suddenly
about the intimacy
that he feels
with his wok,
how he knows
when the oil
will burn, not
to mention the finely
chopped ajo
& the yellow ají,
the crunch of the papas
fritas, the thick
chunks of tomatoes,
& indeed, the very fragrance
of attention with which he’d sear
the sirloin
in the kitchen,
where daily, I listened
as he repeated the exact phrasings
of a cassette that taught him
Cantonese.

Isn’t fluency
an utterly
bland word, cooked
at room temperature, devoid
of the flame
that sustains the wok
with its awkwardly shaped
tongue
that warms
up & then submits to a people?