Grisel Y. Acosta | To Split a Plantain

See the table where a starving family sits,
a stew at the center, one chicken leg left for three
daughters, and the mother says, “Split it.”

Notice the girls’ eyes widen as they contemplate
a difficult dissection of what is meant to be whole,
as if they were the conductors of death.

A similar chord strikes when I must choose:
Black, white, Tairona, Colombian, Cuban, US, and
heritage unknown, buried under colonial shipwreck jungles.

Musa acuminate and musa balbisiana are foreign to us,
a forgotten history of the hybrid we call plantain. Can we divide
the pulp into segments that resemble the past? No,

we can only mash, boil, bake, fry, refine it into flour,
make it bloom in oil and syrup. We must work with the existing
body, see it as complete, in all its parts. Or just let it be,

without stripping it of its skin, without adding flavor we imagine
missing, find the staple in our lives, the thing that nourishes us
rooted in its own plot of land, the fruitful child of all the history before it.