This poem is part of the SPOONFEED takeover of New Writing, curated by Kat Payne Ware and Sean Wai Keung. You can read the issue in full at spoonfeedmag.com/spoonfeed-x-new-writing
There are two types of people:
those who can cook egg fried rice
and those who can only try.
Here is the cultural barrier:
wok hay. You either have it
or you don’t. In the spirit of stir-fry,
here lies the unspoken breadth.
Here lies the gap between your culture
and mine, where rice is not
just rice. Where rice, like words,
weighs heavy on the tongue
before it passes into thought.