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Homeless Near the train tracks, at the Cañon City intersection, 13 th Street and Royal Gorge Boulevard-- a woman holds up her sign sketched on a pizza box with a permanent chisel-tip Sharpie: Once I was a foster child Once, as in Once Upon a Time, how every fairytale begins. Here’s the story where the unwanted princess with tumbling red hair escapes the stone and mortared dungeon and runs from the ivy-covered castle, but loses the secret key that opens the golden room of mirrors. I was, as in past tense, not what’s happening this minute, as in not anymore. Such a good line break for her six-word narrative poem, if only that was what she was writing. The perfect enjambment of it. a foster—what its linguistic root requests: from fostra, Old English, food, fodder, forage —what she’s learned well-- as in a perforated bag of apples and Safeway donut carton at her feet between the itchy bindweed and the noxious thistle. child, as in a baby, as in daughter atoning the sins of her mother and father in this concrete wilderness, another holding place of survival, a woman-child who possesses lightning in her eyes, thunder on her tongue, who paces the curve of the railroad tracks, ticketless. THEME: Childhood Hunger  D. Walsh Gilbert is dual citizen of the Republic of Ireland and the United States and lives in Connecticut on a former sheep farm at the foot of Talcott Mountain, the prior lands of the Tunxis peoples to whom she gives deep gratitude and promises good stewardship. Her forthcoming book, SNARL (Kelsay Books), will be released summer, 2026. Alumna of Wesleyan University, class of 1979, she leads a poetry workshop for members of Connecticut Poetry Society as well as a creative writing program for residents of Masonicare at Middlewoods of Farmington. She has recently joined the board of the Sancho Panza Literary Society.
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A Letter to the West from the Sub-Sahara My western and distant pal! You have it plentifully seen! You have it plentifully eaten! You always trash the necessities of the Sub-Sahara You have them in courses, so do you in sweet-coated and varied delights. You consume and consume so much of them! You get sated at the very peak of your insatiable appetites. Your maximum gratification and enjoyment decline and become bland. All an indigent Sub-Saharan like me can do, is just stare longingly from my want-stricken And famine ravaged landmass. You are hedonic, but I am miserable! Your wasted crumbs are my daily fantasies: Your discarded marmalade, Vienna sausages, Hungarian goulash, cheese and pizza. I consume your coco-pops, Kellogg cereals and oat meals in nothing more than My very best of dreams and fantasies!  Joseph C. Ogbonna is a widely published poet. His works have been published in magazines, journals, anthologies, self-published volumes and in online blogs. He lives in Enugu, Nigeria.
Steam Steam rises from the bowl across the table. Slow. White. Alive. It curls into the air like something with freedom, like it knows it will disappear but rises anyway. She watches it carefully, the way other children watch cartoons or passing cars. The steam twists, thins, fades. She times its vanishing. No one notices she is not looking at the food. Only at what leaves it. Her hands stay folded in her lap, fingers laced together as if holding themselves in place. The smell reaches her before the warmth does. Rice. Broth. Something salted and kind. Her stomach answers in a language she pretends not to understand. Steam was never meant to be studied like this. Never meant to be someone’s only portion. But she follows every ghostly ribbon of it until the bowl across from her stops speaking. And the air goes clear again. Theme: Childhood hunger BIO: Rana Musleh is a student at Lehman College and a writer whose work focuses on dignity, hunger, and the emotional realities of food insecurity. Her work has been published by West Side Campaign Against Hunger and Poetry X Hunger. She uses poetry to explore how memory, culture, and inequality shape access to food and belonging. Through poetry, she hopes to turn awareness into empathy and empathy into action.
Potatoes Delicious when mashed and covered in gravy, or Cubed and tossed with olive oil, paprika, fresh rosemary and garlic before being roasted as part of my favorite sheet pan supper, fat from chicken thighs crisping each morsel to sublime, or Baked whole and topped with butter, sour cream and more sour cream, or French fried, of course, or Boiled baby reds with butter, lemon and parsley, or Sliced and fried in Grandma’s cast iron skillet, seasoned with just salt and pepper, or Hashed browned, or Pureed with leeks and stock into soup, but not Raw from a field at the edge of my childhood where we’d been told we could take ones left behind after harvest, not The farmer, when he arrived, gruff and angry, not My mother, on her knees in the dirt, offering to put them back, not him, waving her away. THEME: Childhood Hunger, How food can elicit a memory of scarcity BIO: Megan Schliesman lives in Madison, Wisconsin. A retired librarian, Megan's professional work and writing concentrated on children's and young adult literature and intellectual freedom in libraries and classrooms. In retirement she’s broadened her writing focus while continuing to often grapple with challenges to democracy and Constitutional rights in our country.
Bon Bon Terre Christmas 2025 I watch a video on which a woman explains how to make Bon Bon Tere, Dirt Cookies. The cookies are made with sanitized dirt, some salt, and margarine. They have no nutritional value. In Haiti, they are fed to hungry children who have nothing else to eat. Later that same day, my partner and I are walking on a winter sidewalk which is liberally spread with salt. A man walking his dog, gently picks him up, tucks him under his arm, and walks across the salt littered sidewalk. “It’ll hurt his paws,” the man explains. How do I reconcile that I live in a world where hungry children eat dirt and well-fed dogs are carried to protect their paws. THEME: Childhood Hunger  Marianna Boncek is a writer and teaches in an MFA program. She writes across the genre having published 2 books of nonfiction, two novels and a short collection of poetry. Her plays have also been featured in the Hudson Valley Play Festival. Her poem "Bittersweet" won the 2021 Stephen Dibiase poetry prize. She lives in New York's Hudson Valley with her partner, Dave and her two cats Sputnik and Couper.
Desert Cry Children of Gaza forgotten by all How has the world forsaken you. Having no might They starve you, bomb you, drive you from your home. Where once you ran, and played with friends close, now scattered beyond collection. Where families joined together in celebrations gone. The price to pay is dear. Too dear for innocence lost without permission. What right is given to those who commit the unconscionable acts. Children of Gaza I want you to know This voice hears your cry Knows your suffering Each of you -- Not forgotten. Children of Gaza live so that you may tell your story. THEME: Childhood Hunger  Alida Franco’s academic training was in French/English Literature (BA: Oakland University) and Applied Linguistics/English (MA: Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado). At a friends’ request, she recently attended a creative writer’s symposium, which she thoroughly enjoyed, and realized how much she had missed writing. She is now drawn to poetry because of the power of the word and its openness and linguistic flexibility in both structure and language.
Humpty Dumpty Humpty Dumpty wobbled on the wall. The children below bellowed for a fall. Humpty, the last of his kind, hid tears behind his spectacles. He knew his fate, written long ago. There were no eggs left to feed the children, the chickens all dead from bird flu. The children were hungry and cruel. One threw a stone. Humpty struggled to keep his balance, but too late. The fall was great. His last memory was the crack of his shell as he hit the pavement. The children rushed to lick Humpty’s golden remains from the cement. The king, all his horses, and all his men laughed and left the scene, for they had their own secret stash of chickens back at the palace, and they weren’t sharing those birds with Nobody! THEME: Childhood Hunger  Maggie Bloomfield is a therapist/performer/published/award-winning poet, and an EMMY award winner for lyrics on Sesame Street. She has published two chapbooks, Trains of Thought, Local Gems Press, (2016) and Sleepless Nights (Finishing Line Press,(2019). Maggie holds an MFA from Stony Brook, Southampton (SBSH) and co-hosts Poetry Street, a monthly poetry venue in Riverhead, NY.
www.maggiebloomfield.com SNAP Sometimes, I still remember, the despair in your eyes, As we lined up in the checkout line, Nine boxes of hamburger helper, I think I’m too pretty to have to eat. So I sit at the table and pretend to maneuver around my plate, Thinking one day, I’ll sit in beautiful restaurants with pretty black plates, And he’ll tell me I can order whatever I want... Mcdonald’s a late night drunk stop, Not an thirty-five minute walk, Once a month, as a “treat” in a South Texas parking lot. Minimum wage is three dollars, so we dig for quarters in corners of couches, For the black bags of laundry we load into grocery carts, To walk thirty five minutes, across from the Once A Month Mcdonalds, And then walk our clean clothes, back in black bags and grey carts, Sweating up and down hills through Los Angeles heights, Clothes we just washed, sweating among their own socks. The four of us live on Lone Star, SNAP in other states, It’s hardly enough, for older brother in football. Eldest daughter in swim. Jars of .95 cent Ragus and .50 cent spaghetti noodles, Topped with American cheese, made in bulk. And the girl in me just wants to snap, Watching her try to even entertain Thanksgiving. So I eat extra at school and friends houses. Twenty years later, just me, I still pray and near cry in grocery lines, Even though I know my card won’t decline. BIO: Jess is a Mexican American writer and human rights activist from South Texas. She has been published by the International Human Rights Art Movement, Writers Resist, Missing Perspectives and Dissent Voices. She is nominated for a PEN Robert Dau and Pushcart Short Story Prize. Her work focus on intergenerational trauma, reconciliation through narrative power and Mexican American experience in America.
The Day Six Hundred Eighty Five Thousand Boxes of Plumpy’Nut -- Paid For -- Expire* “A starving child on the brink of death can be brought back with a specialty peanut paste, Plumpy’Nut, costing just $1 a day.” Nicholas Kristof The hot afternoon spills its entrails onto the macadam. In our yard the whitetails I love despite their appetite forage through my blue stars like teenagers at a buffet. Above the cracked stone birdbath, sparrows scounge. You replace the propane tank. I handi-wipe pollen off the porch table. At the local high school graduation, empty folding chairs stand in for proud immigrant parents. A billionaire rents Venice for his wedding feast. Workers pave over the White House Rose Garden. A lawn mower drones. We shut the windows, run the A/C 24/7. Like it or not, the noise boomerangs, follows us into the house, where we order furniture from Wayfair, track our heart rates, cycles, the news. A crane pries the letters off the building where USAID used to administer aid programs. The flatware rattles. We wait our turn to speak. Our humanity forks us; we are a university of dunces. We crave carbohydrates. The clock clocks us. An ice cream truck jingles. No children appear. Like it or not, we are tethered. The buck turns his hindquarters to us in full view of invisible children, who proceed to fade away-- Starving for $1 of Plumpy’Nut each. THEME: Childhood Hunger  Faith Paulsen writes poetry from her desk at an insurance agency near Philadelphia. Her work appears in Blue Heron, Mania Magazine, Poetica Review, Philadelphia Stories, Book of Matches, One Art, Panoply, Thimble Literary Magazine, and chapbooks Cyanomoeter (Finishing Line Press) and We Marry We Bury We Sing or We Weep (Moonstone Press). www.faithpaulsenpoet.com
The Strawberries We gorge ourselves on summer fruit, The deep red strawberries dripping Juice down our hands As I open a text, see A photograph from hell. I push my dinner aside-- Warm tortillas filled with beans, rice, salsa, Fresh lettuce, chopped tomatoes, sliced avocado That could feed four people. Stare At the cold glass filled with lemonade. Instead of eating, I want to fast For the skeletons on the front page Of The New York Times-- Children, babies. No food, no water, no aid. No end to misery. Too late. Drops of water on tongues Too late. Morsels of bread Too late. Mankind Too late. We’ve had 300,000 years To learn to care. I fast, praying for food, Water, medicine As if it’s not Too late while a mother watches Her child, shot when reaching for food, Die in her arms. Blood drips down her hands. Our hands. THEME: Childhood Hunger  Connie S. Brady is a writer whose articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Women’s Wear Daily, the Houston Chronicle, Houston Post, Galveston News, Arkansas Democrat, Key Magazine, and others. Born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, she witnessed the integration crisis from next door, as crosses burned in the yards of neighbors—both editors for the local newspapers. Brady is at work on a memoir. She lives in Houston.
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