Mother fetches the fruit from the mango grove 
       behind closed bamboo. 
       Rips its paper-leather cover during midday recess, 
before English class, describes their dance peaches plums cantaloupes before my first-world  eyes. When the sun blazed on the dust,

she let the mellifluous fluids 
       fall on her assignment books. 
Where the mangos were first planted, mother, 
an infant, hid under gravel swaddled by Lola, my grandmother, 
after my mother’s aunt and uncle were tied to the trunk 
       and stabbed 
by the Japanese. Mother and daughter living off fallen mangos, the pits planted in darkness, before I was born.

We left the Philippines for California dodging 
U.S. Customs with the forbidden fruit, thinking who’d deprive mother of her mangos. 
Head down, my father denies that we have perishable 
       foods, waving passports in the still air, motioning for us to proceed towards the terminal. 
Behind a long line of travelers, 

my sisters surround mother 
like shoji screens as she hides the newspaper-covered 
       fruit between her legs. Mangos sleeping in the hammock of her skirt, a brilliant batik billowing from the motion of airline caddies pushing suitcases on metal carts. 

We walk around mother 
       forming a crucifix where she was center. 
On the plane as we cross time zones, mom unwraps her ripe mangos, the ones from the tree Lola planted before she gave birth to my mother, 

the daughter that left home to be a nurse 
in the States, 
       who’d marry a Filipino navy man and have three children of her own. Mother eating 
the fruit whose juices rain over deserts and cornfields.