“First Mango” by Vince Gotera

Remember that June before our wedding we spent

in San Francisco? That first morning you woke

to my brother in silver sequins singing like

Diana Ross? What must have gone through your mind?

What kind of people were you marrying into?

My father who laughed a lot but was schizophrenic.

My stepmom who’d tried, they say, to stab him in the back

with scissors. Love may be blind, but not stone blind.

Then, one Sunday we bought at the corner market

one perfectly ripened red-gold mango.

How carefully I slit the skin with my penknife

…rivers of yellow juice, the furry seed…

then sliced the golden half-moons into quadrangles,

open petals. Your first bite of our sweet life.

Paraphrase: The speaker is reminiscent about their life before he and his wife got married. He wonders what his wife thought about his family when she had first met them.

Analysis: The speaker seems a little unsure of what his wife thought of his family when she first met them because his family is a little dysfunctional. However, in the second stanza, he seems more sure about his wife-to-be when they share a mango, and she has her “…first bite of [their] sweet life” (line 14).

Why I chose this poem: I thought this was a sweet love poem and I really liked that the author of this poem used mango, the national fruit of the Philippines, to really unite the couple as one.