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Palaver Arts Magazine

Tri-tip

ByHanna Liang November 17, 2025

Tri Tip poem: On Saturday nights, my brother sears steaks on charred stovetops: sirloin, skirt, ribeye. He bases butter and thyme, rosemary and resin, retching shrieks from the strings of his fiddle. Beef tallow spits tempo from his finger-tips: Tchaikovsky-like. On this cast-iron-sounding-board, his piano is forte. Tar-strips drip over his eyes: wayward and wanting, hoisin and worcestershire, whistling wolf tones. His hands are wet from the sweat of two worlds. My brother is this: a boy who plays with steak-strings instead of heart-strings, resin instead of roses. His meat– peppered with profanity– is ground by his teeth. On the dinner table, Grandfather’s pursed lips pick at sinew sewn between teeth. He tips his grandson with a beefing tongue; his spittle, tap-dancing like tallow on my brother’s bare arms. He is this: a man who raises stakes at casinos, sweating spendings instead of savings with poker. Aging doesn’t make his tenor more tender. He likes his steaks rare like women; his lips kiss Risk. His ears are pleased with clamoring copper, his tongue, placated by iodine coins. On this family-meat-carving-board, his Jack knows all trades. He cosplays Santa every Christmas, collecting currency from his chaste choir of grandchildren. His red cap– festive and farcical– is his hand’s ace of spades. On this cast-iron stove, steak lies supine, simmering in a pool of its own spit. Seething at the ceiling, it cat-calls the smoke detector, hot breath as tendon-strings, taut and elastic. The scent of skirt steak and sirloin and ribeye spills from the skillet, screaming like sorceresses on scaffolds in Salem, Massachusetts. At our dinner table, mass chewing persists. Molars melt into beef-skirts, ripping ruffles with razors, rich and red as rosemary in wine. Our boys raise steaks to the skillet. Our men raise stakes with their tongues, spewing spit at boys seared medium-rare. In this steak house they run, meat is never well-done. A man’s age– charred by cynicism– salivates for boys’ stakes.

Hanna Liang is a bit too obsessed with the written word and the ways it relays human thoughts, emotions, and sounds. She is a current sophomore studying Creative Writing and Psychology at the University of Southern California, and a staff writer for Descent Magazine. You can find Hanna on Instagram here, or scrunched up in any discreet nook annotating a book with her cat, sipping warm oolong tea.