Also known as death cap: “As described by surviving victims, the taste is quite good.”
– Fuller and McClintock, Poisonous Plants of California
His mouth sang with homespun words
like a basket around the heart of the new girl
eighteen years old from Canton
Benjamin Tang: a prodigy, the American-born
boy chef at the Star of China
bouncing on a bed of applause.
They had a picnic in the California woods they were
holding hands like Hansel and Gretel
blackhaired siblings
the trees huddling like parents watching
as he gently spread the grasses apart,
snapped the tender white stems,
mouse-umbrellas piled in her lap
just like with her baba in China
that golden autumn day, her feet sinking deep
in the fragrant loam
the treasure carried home in newspaper.
People come from all over the world
he bragged, just for a mouthful of my
Glimpse of Paradise soup.
The green-gold veil of steam its perfume a kind of warning
wrapping its fingers around her face
she lifted the white bowl, saw the gentle floating wings
and drank for the last time
in the body she was born with.
The hospital staff, their hands moving swiftly, whispered over them, so beautiful
their perfect inky hair spilling
onto the metal table
The poison streaked through their bodies,
flowering into small explosions
They slept on, in a white and silver room clicking like crickets
She woke up two weeks later
with a frown stapled across her belly.
Sisters and mother,
all talking at once: helicopter, operation, miracles.
You have a new liver, they told her.
You are both very lucky.
And him? she cried. He is still sleeping.
Under her skin the new liver pulses,
welcomes the rush of her
blood that has no choice
but to pour itself through
not really new either, it is twenty-one years old,
and used
the previous owner some honey-haired boy
his bright jacket a speck of confetti against Half Dome
his arms spread wide, a falling angel.
She wonders about Benjamin, whether his was a girl or a boy
the soft dark child he
carries inside him.
