Y.S. LEE

God, Spoon, Fork

“If your rice is served in a bowl, use chopsticks. If it’s served on a flat plate, use a combination fork and spoon.”
—Frommer’s “Etiquette in Singapore”

“break, blow, burn, and make me new”
—Donne, “Holy Sonnet 14”

It’s damn hard to eat rice off a plate with chopsticks, so you 
Adopt Sheffield-forged cutlery: bright, stainless. These amend 
Your reputation with the British, demonstrate how you’ll bend 
To their stiff little rituals, litany of thank-yous, bless-yous, new 
You—and what for? You swear you’ve learned all that’s due 
Yet they still smirk, titter, dismiss. (You’ll be a peon to the end.) 
The old ones grow suspicious of this hybrid state, but you defend 
It as pragmatic. Essential. Spoons scrape! Forks stab! It’s true! 
Then the church and its mummeries. At first, you had to feign 
Piety, suffer the prim homilies of an old colonial enemy. 
But now you savour the parched wafer—yes, again, feed me again— 
Laid on your tongue by a pale-eyed father. You learn to say I,
Not we, conflate penance with prayer, identify as free.
Now, cold steel at your ancestral meal clangs Jesus loves me. 

Y. S. LEE

is the winner of CV2’s 2022 Foster Poetry Prize. Her lyric essay “Tek Tek” was shortlisted for the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize and her fiction includes the YA mystery series The Agency (Candlewick Press). Her debut picture book, Mrs. Nobody, is forthcoming from Groundwood Books.