Fruition is from Caballero’s prize-winning manuscript, MAMMAL. It was presented in 2024 at the Los Angeles County Library’s main branch during a yearlong exhibition hosted by Standard Vision.
As with much of Caballero’s work, this poem takes the everyday cooking of a dish as a way to access the Goethe’s Faust and Emerson’s philosophical musings. Fruition’s speaker seeks fulfillment while acknowledging the constraints that govern our lives. As with much of Caballero’s work, this text uses the mundane as a point of entry into the philosophical.
The speaker references Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar,” in which Emerson criticizes the human need to name and order the word, expounding a return to a more natural state in which the world is experienced without a need to control it. The speaker then juxtaposes this view against Goethe’s philosophies, whose book Faustus questions the sustainability, not to mention ethics, of our desire to experience more and more, and more.
Solace is found in the historical figure of Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial system of naming—who categorized the world while living “a categorically unsortable life.”
Originally published in The Acentos Review.
Fruition
There must be a right way to chop cauliflower, one that doesn’t spew a million tiny florets all over the kitchen counter like so many clots of beige blood bursting from a zero-gravity wound, you see, I have this problem whereby I can’t stand mess anymore—which is a problem because Emerson says it’s a problem, this need of my mind to categorize though I can’t help the despair I feel (which must look like rage to my children) when I see burnt turmeric all over the stove before sitting down to eat—I know what you’re thinking— why not heat up tortillas, but I have this other problem, which is I crave tikka masala every week, and that’s a problem because Goethe says it’s a problem, this need of my mind to live full at all cost, so I mince ginger and onion though the skins and rinds drive me nuts, even crazier, I’ll over-sprinkle cumin and coriander until they jet out of the pan (because, come on, live a little) but then immediately I must sponge it up, so I wonder if I’m the secret villain from a Telemundo soap opera who won’t just chill and grill tortillas, but instead must wreck the lives of other people— here "other people’s lives” a metaphor for tikka masala (but you got that, of course)—and the mess in my kitchen isn’t so bad as the rush in my brain to tidy it up, not as bad as how my opposing problems collide: my desire for explosive mixtures of spices (bang!) against my fixation for impeccable counters— now you see why I must turn and return to Linnaeus, who tells me it’s fine to catalogue every crumb, while I concoct a categorically unsortable life.
From Caballero’s manuscript MAMMAL. Originally published by The Acentos Review.