On the occasion of a Giant Eagle employee double-checking to make sure
I rang the right item up at self-checkout
Truth: Plátanos are the only produce item I know the PLU code for (4235). Lie: It’s my Caribbean pride. Truth: I just got tired of looking up plantain bananas every time I used self-checkout. Truth: I grew tired of my white roommate calling them bananas every time I cooked them. Truth: Once, I traveled from Pittsburgh to Virginia with a group of white kids and laughed when they brought back unripe plátanos from their grocery run instead of bananas. Lie: I learned to love plátanos from my father, who cooked them for me as a child. Truth: I learned to love plátano the day my father brought home food from a Puerto Rican restaurant that no longer exists. Truth: To this day, that’s the only time we’ve ever eaten plátano together. Truth: I got tired of taking them through the regular checkout line. Truth: Once, I bought unripe plátanos at Whole Foods, and the cashier asked me how I was going to cook them. Lie: When I said, Fry ’em, I wanted him to imagine the slice of a knife down the green ridge of skin, how careful I have to be not to cut myself as it slides out. The bits that stay lodged under my fingernails after peeling. The fragility of once-fried chunks when smashed down for a second frying. How sometimes the heat of the oil fractures them further. Truth: I buy plátanos to fix my own fractures. Truth: When the self-checkout machine shouts Place your “plan-TAYNS” in the bag! and a Giant Eagle employee asks me to remove them, I’m only a little annoyed. Lie: It’s because of the way the machine pronounces the word plantain. My Caribbean pride again. Truth: Once, I had a Jamaican student who sent me the restaurant clip from the movie Pirates, and the whole class stared at me laughing when Shiloh Coke’s character asked, Where you find that, on a moun-TAYN? Lie: I have never loved anyone who pronounces it plan-TAYNS. Truth: Once, I sat with a Belizean homie in college at our work-study job and they asked me to repeat it when I said “PLAN-tin”—finally a tongue they recognized. Truth: I later cooked tostones for them. Truth: We later slept like dead after I mashed garlic and almond into a mofongo they could eat. Lie: I’m trying not to make plátano a symbol of Caribbean identity. Lie: I don’t pretend my plátano-heavy diet legitimizes my diaspora poems. Truth: I buy plátano at the grocery store almost every week, even when I don’t feel like cooking it.
Malcolm Friend is a poet from the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle, Washington and the author of the chapbook mxd kd mixtape (Glass Poetry, 2017) and the full-length collection Our Bruises Kept Singing Purple (In-landia Books, 2018). With JR Mahung he is a member of Black Plantains, an Afro-Caribbean poetry collective.
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