If you were ever told that there were starving children somewhere
who would be ecstatic to eat your unwanted food,
then you learned which country your parents believed
had the most underfed children, their projection
in the kind of staggering numbers that would make
even a world hunger demographics clueless seven-year-old feel guilty.
For a long time, whenever I thought of India, I pictured lamb chops.
Growing up, I couldn’t stand the smell of the things, so I wouldn’t eat them.
On the map India even looked suspiciously like a lamb chop.
Shame on me, these delicacies, I was told every single time,
as if I’d forgotten, would make an Indian child’s day,
and the way my mom painted the picture,
I imagined them standing outside the post office,
waiting for our evil smelling package,
rendered all the more malodorously unappealing
for the lengthy unrefrigerated journey by mail from Hawai‘i.
Yay, I could hear them cheer, the Lees have had lamb chops again.
Tear that baby open and let’s dig in.
Too bad the kid actually likes peas and carrots.
It would be awesome to have a side of veggies.
Lanning Lee 