Feast

Ina Cariño’s debut, Feast, relays various lush feasts of language and of food: “evenings I forage a feast for the body, skim fat from yesterday’s soup for tomorrow’s stew.” Listing, lilting poems on food announce connections to intimacy, necessity, and sacrifice. In the title poem, an animal is violently and efficiently slaughtered while cousins, aunties, and maids all watch. As they “feast / on buttery things,” senses blur and the killed suckling returns in memory: 

from the back of my mouth, a splash 
of bile washes my cheeks & soon 
I can’t tell sweet from bitter, can’t 

remember how to swallow salt 
the way a suckling in slaughter 
must swallow its own briny tears. 

Throughout the book, food is used to celebrate and grieve, reflect and solve, often alongside nanay and lolas, mother and grandmothers and their stoves or gardens. In “Yesterday’s Traumas, Today’s Salt,” salt is both burden and panacea:

because my stolen body

is still burdened with salt, my tongue pinched with its bite,
   I salt 
bitter gourd […]
I salt the rice heavy when the meat is low, to trick my stomach
out of hunger 

Days begin and end with salt, in one poem: 

mornings                      I wash salt 
from my body

and in another, “you wash / the day’s salt / off your hands.” And salt is what the speaker craves, “the sting of it / threshing my inner // cheeks—.”

In Feast, the body can be slow or green, throbbing or decorated, a vessel or salted, terrible or stolen. In “You Dream of Saints,” the speaker distinguishes between the body and a sense of self: 

your body 

throbs, cold from the frost
on the ground. you think you hear 

your mother calling. you think 

you are mother—
you think you are calling.