Orange Peels – Writers House Review

Anne Ming

Your father is holding an orange, calloused hands. Gentle

hands. Work exhausts him. At home he sits on the sofa,

scraping rind from flesh in one long peel.

The orange is from San Joaquin, California. It’s picked from

the tree not quite ripe and packed in with its peers.

It travels two thousand miles to arrive here.

Across the country, your father hands it to you. You

open it up: halves, quarters, slices. The white pith of it

webs like snow.

Your father is a writer, but his words are rare. So,

remember this as love. Your father is Chinese,

but he must be American. So, remember this as home.

When you leave home, your mother gives you a bag of mandarins

to take with you. It’s a symbol of good luck,

all of it, down to the red mesh sack.

But in that moment, your mother isn’t thinking

of fortune. She’s thinking about how

when you were younger, she used to pack oranges in your lunch;

how you learned that she dried the peels to use in cooking;

how you started saving your peels for her, after.

The orange is a whole history of the world; it’s a whole history of

you. Meanwhile, the flowering trees are blooming again.

Meanwhile, your life goes on and on and on.

On the windowsill, the peels dry and harden;

there are more there than your mother could ever need. And

the sunlight streams through the open window. And your father is humming

again—an old, wordless song that carries on the springtime breeze,

past all your past, across the miles,

and into you.

Anne Ming, class of 2026, is from Rockville, Maryland. She says, “Look, Mom! If you’re reading this, you made it into the Rutgers Writers House Review! Please translate it for Dad, since he’s here too. I love you.”

Anne wrote this poem in a creative writing class taught by Professor Paul Blaney. Blaney selected the piece for inclusion in WHR.