The Vibrant Channeled Creator

Mayan head-dress- Mo Yan (don’t speak)

The Beautiful Sandwich
by Brad Ricca

She could always make
the most beautiful sandwich.
Laced swiss cheese: sliced
crossways, folded once.
Ham in rolls like sleeping bags.
Turkey piled like shirts.
Tarragon. Oregano. Pepper.
Herb dill mayonnaise the color of
skin. On top: the thin, wandering line of
mustard
like a contour on a map
in a thin, flat drawer.
Or a single, lost vein.
The poppyseeds hold on,
for now.

Placed on a plate like isolated
driftwood
or a large, solemn head.
The spilled chips in yellow piles
are like the strange coins
of tall, awkward islanders.
The thin dill pickle: their boat
slides into
the green-sour sea.

Brad Ricca, “The Beautiful Sandwich” from American Mastodon, © Black Lawrence Press.

It’s the birthday of novelist Mo Yan , born in Gaomi, China (1955). He is the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize in literature (2012). Yan was born Guan Moye, but his parents were always warning him not to speak his mind outside the home, which he ignored. He says, “I was lazy. I had a greedy mouth, and I could not stop talking. There really wasn’t much about me worth loving, and that often drew a sigh from my mother.”
Yan is best known for his novel Red Sorghum: A Novel of China (1986), which spans more than 50 years of the Shandong family, who own a sorghum distillery and join the resistance during the Second Sino-Japanese War. “Mo Yan” means “don’t speak” in Chinese.
Mo Yan was born into a peasant family. They were the largest clan in the village and even had two trees, an apricot and a pear. He was eleven when the Cultural Revolution began and left school to work on a farm as a cattle herder. Later, he worked in a cotton factory before enlisting in the People’s Liberation Army (1976). He began writing as a soldier, completing his first novel, titled A Transparent Radish, in 1984. He followed that with The Garlic Ballads (1988).
When he was awarded the Nobel Prize, Mo Yan said: “For a writer, the best way to speak is by writing. You will find everything I need to say in my works. Speech is carried off by the wind; the written word can never be obliterated.”

from the Poetry Almanac; February 17, 2021