Shrimp
 
I didn’t know I was hungry.
I liked peanut butter sandwiches.
Rice was good, with Kool-Aid.
 
So, everything was the same.
I didn’t understand any differently.
My father was a poor law student,
 
my mom working at the Sizzler.
There wasn’t enough money
to spread through a month.
 
What kept us fed, my mom said later,
was the shrimp my uncle brought,
covered in ice, in a red cooler.
 
I don’t think we can repay him,
despite our differences in opinions.
He was a shrimper on the coast,
 
as the seafood started to give out
in the Gulf, as he settled down,
and the food he provided me
 
would later allow me to get seasick,
fearful of falling off any boat,
unable to swim like a shrimp.

​Donald Illich (Montgomery County, MD)  has published poetry in journals such as Poet Lore, The Iowa Review, and Map Literary.  He recently published a book, Chance Bodies (The Word Works, 2018).
​

​I Consider
 
I consider--
I used to bring my infusion nurse chocolates because I dug the way Eli took care of the woman who vomited next to me. She was two decades younger with a mass of black curls we both knew she would lose. Her husband sat in the chair next to her, fidgeting with his backpack strap while she got sick. I knew how the poison made her veins taste like menthol and food taste like chewing bullets. I wanted to suggest plastic forks, but I left it to Eli, the nurse, to silently give my Cancer neighbor an extra pillow and ginger ale in a Styrofoam cup.
I consider--
I am well now. Yesterday, I sucked down half a pound of shrimp and almost as many fried pickles. I stuffed my face with seafood and the South after sun and baseball and beer, and I couldn’t help but remember that, even when I was strapped in that chair hooked up to dripping venom, I knew that it would end. I would eat again.
I consider--
When true hunger gnaws, with no respite, our stomachs shrink to walnut size, and our bodies reject sustenance even when it’s offered. Now, with a nation not well, with land fracked and skies fried, with fields of golden hair we all know we will lose, I consider. I shudder. Then the bile rises--
Again.

​Sally Toner is a high school English teacher who has lived in the Washington DC area for almost 25 years. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, The Watershed Review, The Delmarva Review, and other publications.
​

Through this soil, we connect
 
Hard work, yes
Good work, honest work
but these hands are humble, too
Planting and pulling food
straight from the belly of the earth
in the hopes that it goes on to fill other bellies
in other places
Perhaps even now
hands that have never touched the soil
are touching the earth
through me
as they lovingly embrace
a fresh peach or pear or plum
So too, do they embrace me.
 

Reana Kovalcik lives and works in Washington DC, where she leads communications for a sustainable agriculture-focused organization. Reana is a lifelong lover of literature, writing, and poetry.

​

​Eat These Words
 
Like your own mother
She wants only
Healthy children in school
Bright eyes and brains
 
The small farmer
Sweat rolls from her face
Pointed stick planting hoe weeding
Food only if it rains
 
The well is all day
Every day 25 meters down rubber bucket
For drinking washing cooking every thing
Family needs water you know
 
Rural electrification
Brings green rice fields and income
Time and pumps and spigots and vegetables
Schools too sprout and grow
 
Educating her daughters
Feeding every child’s mind
This woman smiles
Like your own mother

Paul Guenette (Montgomery County, MD) is a recently retired economic development manager with expertise in international agribusiness. Mr. Guenette designed and managed development programs in a career spanning 45 years and 90 countries.

WISE CHILD
 
Most of us, I think, aren’t doing our best.
We don’t share goods, we do not trust.
Except one eight year-old American girl
whose parents came from Palestine,
wrote a poem in school with this refrain: 
“Let the parents of your friend like your parents,
and your parents like the parents of your friend.”
May that verse be our mantra, breathed,
printed for all to see in her charter school’s
annual book of second-grade pupil’s poems.
Pencil in her fingers, clarity of her truth
in class, of San Francisco’s angelic youth!
Who cares she does or doesn’t rhyme?
Her words do mean to set the world aright:
“Let parents of our friend like our parents, and
 let our parents like the parents of our friend.”
May other pencils write as well to the heart of it.
Listen to her; learn as in school, as from a great soul,
like mahatma Gandhi, who said For hungry people,
the only form in which God dare appear, is food.
Learn from her as from the Reverend Martin King, Jr.
who knew that anger is a species of fear, just an energy
to fuel his army of ahimsa.  Many of us are still angry.
Much work waits to be done, as we swim separately
in schools. Do you ken what I am keening about
(Such selfishly gated greed, so heedless of injustice)?
Our unfair land languishes for this girl’s banquet.
Let earth be shared, hate cleaned from the slate.
Every body of us hungry, might fight with fierce frown,
Old alma mater keeps Fear’s flag a-flying. I’m just asking,
some troubled citizens were wondering: Could we harbor
that vision in our own warm bosoms? May we too, say: 
“Let parents of our friend like our parents, and
 let our parents like the parents of our friend.” 

Max Ochs (Anne Arundel County, MD) has spent over 60 years trying to write one decent poem. He has not yet succeeded, but along the way he has met met some amazing poets. 

HUNGER
 
Two boys and a dog
jumped the fence to steal
an armful of apples.
To tell it later, those
long summer days
were the best of their lives.
 
Over the hills they rambled,
jousting the sun,
dreaming kingdoms in the corn.
Talk of ships
sailing for blue
lands, where hunger never was,
filled nights of stars ripe
for the naming.
 
Left to their own — father
off somewhere,
looking for work or a
drink — mother
home with sister and chickens
that never laid enough eggs
to keep a family going --
pantry nearly bare,
two masonjars of tomatoes,
half-sack of corn-meal,
and a tin of tartar sauce.
 
There was time and scarcely time
to write in years
what followed — how
the old hound bayed her last,
and broad seas claimed
the younger brother, and how
the lands beyond the blue
held hunger enough.
 
It stayed with him,
that boy who grew from story
to story, keeping the best parts,
trying to make it all rhyme.

​W. Luther Jett (Montgomery County, MD) is a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: “Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father”, released by Finishing Line Press in 2015, and “Our Situation”, released by Prolific Press, 2018.
​

​Then and Now
           
            …we’re beginning,/each one beginning
                                    —Aaron R
 
In the Eden of imagination, it is early evening…
insects wheeze and buzz, glad for the cool,
and a barefoot woman in a soft cotton dress
walks lightly on damp grass. She’s in an orchard,
and her hand reaches for the reddest apple.
Its sweet juice and crunch explode joy in her mouth.
There is no taste like this and no punishment,
for it is all happening now and the orchard is real,
planted on a vacant, city lot in the middle
of our country by a woman named Countryman.
It is a kind of Eden, where anyone can walk,
pick pears, figs, apples, peaches, berries too,
in their season—all free—and why not? asked
poet Ross Gay, who joined this good work,
while in other cities, communities are finding
abandoned parks, forgotten school yards and, yes,
they are planting orchards with the knowledge
we were born to….knowledge we can eat.

Patricia Gray (Washington, DC) writes fiction and poetry and teaches Creative Writing at The Writer's Center's downtown campus in Washington, DC. Her poetry collection, Rupture, was published by Red Hen Press.
​

​Comfort Food 
 
Lentils and barley,
water and salt,
split peas and pasta--
pure to a fault--
 
stir until clouded,
season to taste,
boil and then simmer,
nothing to waste.
 
Greens can be added.
Time's on a loop.
Towers have toppled
into the soup.
 
Cauldron of comfort
served with warm hands,
this is a recipe
crisis demands.

​Author of Humor Me ( 2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), Claudia Gary (Loudoun County, VA) is also a health and science journalist. She teaches at The Writer’s Center (writer.org), FAES (FAES.org), and elsewhere. See pw.org/content/claudia_gary, @claudiagary.

Then There Was No More
 
I take the apple,
bite into it 
as its flesh touches 
teeth--
the noise catches
his attention 
turning, eye to eye
I swallow slowly
to hide my cache--
his eyes plead 
and I offer half
of what is left,
savoring his gift
he nods in gratitude,
then another hears
the flesh touch
his teeth--
eye to eye
he offers half of
his cache,
the other nods 
in gratitude--
then another hears
the savory chewing,
but now there
is no more to share 
 

Robert L. Giron (Arlington County, VA) is the author of five poetry collections and two award-winning anthologies. His poetry has been published in three recent anthologies, covering: gay poets, poets from around the world and Latino poets in the Washington, DC area.

​Finishing School
 
Teach a man to fish
And he will eat,
Will stuff his face
Like baked flounder,
Full to bursting
There are so many fish
 
Teach a fish to man,
To sprout stump legs
To slither-crawl
Suck air
To hop-stand-run
To sprout hair
Thumbs
To hunt, wage war
To fish!
And he will consume the planet.
 
His scales will fall like coins,
The cost of transformation
But the scales will never fall from his eyes,
And he will never again feel the fins
That once propelled him
In concert with his brethren
Though skull be widened,
He cannot be trusted
For he is just a fish
And it is unwise to teach
A fish to man.
 
​6 August 2019