196
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2019 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY ERIC TRAN
Treatise on Whether to Write the Mango A missionary’s pitch was to ask if my grandma was planning on Heaven and I was holding a box of mangos when I couldn’t think of a response more than yes and slamming the door with my right hip because a box of mangos can jump from your arms so eagerly, like during a fight with my mom at the store that smells like fish and she says forget them, the mangos, because now they’re sullied by ever-wet foot paths and my ever-shitty teenage attitude (American!), never clearer when I woke wanting mangos instead of the rubbery jackfruit my mom woke at dawn to peel away from the thin white casing and so of course mangoes she had waiting for me, chilled in the fridge after I missed family dinner sliced tic-tac-toe because only mango flesh can yield so readily to a blade or my grandma’s gums, teeth lost to the war, her skin hued and mangoed
ERIC TRAN is a resident physician in psychiatry in Asheville, NC, and received his MFA from UNC Wilmington. He won the 2019 Autumn House Press Emerging Writer’s contest, and his debut book of poetry, The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer, will be published in 2020. His work appears in RHINO, 32 Poems, Missouri Review, and elsewhere.