I woke to drink Kopi O kosong, which is Bahasa Melayu for black coffee with no sugar. The coffee 
is thick and rich and sludgy and I like it 
best when it is brewed with chicory root — 
earthy and bitter and slightly sour. Or, I woke 
to a poem that whistles a promise 
(like all good poems do): “Let him enter 
this small store when the moon shimmers 
        in the blue window panes,
 — let him pinch, before our eyes, tins of chicory.” 
But the magic ingredient in Kopi O is not theft 
nor chicory but margarine, that glistening mound of 
electric yellow developed to keep the French working
class alive just long enough to die on front
lines and factory floors while the emperor’s small 
son was photographed atop a horse and made into 
a nineteenth-century bourgeoisie basketball 
card. In its original form, the lustre was beef 
tallow churned with milk to make a drab 
grey substance. The myth of haute cuisine 
is a tale of cultural imperialism. 

Palm oil came to replace beef tallow in the food 
of the working poor just as the African 
palm, disciplined into neat little rows, came 
to replace rubber trees in the plantations of South East 
Asia. The “organisation” of nature returned 
to the descendants of indentured kulis in a cup 
of thick, black, caffeinated mud that promises to stave 
off fatigue but will only amplify it. An appetite 
that knows no nourishment, like the ouroboros 
or a haze that never lifts. At some point, big butter would try to turn the emerging middle classes against 
the immiserated: “things have come to a strange pass when the steer competes with the cow as a butter maker. We ought not now to desert her or allow 
her to be displaced, her sweet and wholesome product supplanted by an artificial compound 
of grease that may be chemically pure but has 
never known the fragrance of clover.” But 
some know the fragrance of palms and the life force within. The Tamil relative of the oil palm is 
katpaha tharu (“celestial tree”), in its scent 
we remember our future is predicated 
on the abolition of town and country, 
north and south. 


Winner of the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation