Immigrant Song at a Food Truck
I touch your back with my dirty hands.
I open you.
I feel the growing heat
between the sinews
and the egg-white bun.
I eat the white of the bun.
I used to make cranes
that you tossed away
like promises
in a severing winter.
I come to you in my dirty self, a poster
full of deliberate errors
made under duress
by a young and willful staff.
Here I eat you. Here, a food truck
sells sorrows in bun-sized bits, with you
wrapped in newspaper articles
with jarring terms.
I eat you whole, including
the mayo on the photos, but soon
darkness drizzles, my image of you
is a blur, my pen a bird in the air,
a uniformed officer smiles at me
to scrape off even the salt in my hair
and dumps it back into the ocean.
Copyright © 2025 by Weija Pan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem with Li-Young Lee’s ‘The Cleaving’ in mind, thinking about food as a cultural signifier, how easily it carries nostalgia, and how it can also turn into a commodity longing to be consumed. Eating good food feels almost erotic, with all the urgency and expectation. But I also wondered, could these simple acts, from eating certain foods to identifying with certain cultures, become forbidden in a more dystopian future?”
—Weijia Pan
Weijia Pan
