*Note for mobile users: please turn your phone to landscape when reading the second poem, “Olfactory Ode,” to view it in its intended format.*
Ode to the Durian Emoji, Though it is Yet to Exist
Not even the actual fruit but the abstraction
of it that sits alongside “brown,” “Asian,”
“Southeast,” “island,” and “humid.” I have
tasted a fresh durian one time, in the bukid
and Tatay didn’t like it. More than liking
how it tasted I was just tickled to bear
witness. I’ve had it mostly in smoothies
I buy with a banh mi or in lieu of a milk
tea. I adore the divine feminine yellowcream
custard, the transprofanity of a skin with spikes,
the savory queerness of the stinkpig odor. You
know how on Grindr tops use eggplant emoji
and bottoms use peach emoji? What if those
parted lip emoji wrapped around my durian
emoji? What if my durian emoji said touch me,
touch me, touch me? What if my durian emoji
sang the shittiest sex playlist (All ABBA songs
with double and triple talk titles, Kate Bush
in an Australian accent, Whitney and Mariah
on the Prince of Egypt soundtrack)? What if
my durian emoji said look, scratch, sniff, don’t
touch? When I say durian emoji, what white man
part of you wants to tell me about your travels
to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, keep going,
you haven’t said the right one yet but you know
you’ll guess it, you love your Asian boys, know
your Asian boys so damn well, sing gimme
gimme gimme your lumpia after midnight.
Olfactory Ode
lion’s mane
ass-end, burns
under my nostrils, slap
of chains on
the floor, I smell my con-
sciousness pulse,
light bulbs peer
through the blades,
ceiling fan,
I study for shape and
texture, where
to bore through with persist-
ence, from where
to wrest my
knuckles free,
heart eyes e-
moji, pink porcine pic-
to in pro-
file, our flesh unlatched on
wednesday,
on whatsapp
ANTMEN PIMENTEL MENDOZA (she, he) is the author of the chapbook MY BOYFRIEND APOCALYPSE (Nomadic Press, 2023). antmen is a writer, the Acting Co-Director of the Multicultural Community Center at UC Berkeley, and a student at the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His poetry is published or forthcoming in Underblong, Peach Mag, A Velvet Giant and Gigantic Sequins.
EMILY RANKIN was born in Riverside, California and attended university in Texas, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangles of human emotion and understanding, the intuitive messages of dreaming and subconscious exploration. Her work has appeared in such publications as Gasher, Raw Art Review, Meat for Tea, Landlocked,and Rattle. She's based in New Mexico.