The Blue light of Hunger

        Blue lies hidden
        wrapped in layers of sky
        where community gathers.
        A constancy of call becomes morning
        offering a familiarity of longing.
        Shared aloneness,
        set in silhouette
        brokered by hummingbird’s flight
        saturates woodpecker’s echo.
        In this symphony,
        silence speaks.
        She sits in brutality
        beaten by blistering sun, ghosted and ghastly.
        Nothing but an old blue comforter
        between her
        and the earth’s hard misery,
        portioned to those
        placed deeply alone. She sits entirely still, not carried by life nor death,
        but deranged by a violence no one can name.
        Set in silhouette,
        brokered by unseeing eyes
        mourning calls,
        hanging onto forgotten elegies, now a distant echo,
        silenced by the burning sun of hunger.

THEME: Childhood Hunger

Pretend

It’s not the color of your skin
your look of fear
your baby with the sores
around her mouth
her vacant crusted eyes
flies hovering, the sour smell
of your breast milk
that chokes us.

No. We’re tapped out
we’ve given all we can
what about my own children
and saving for retirement?
There’s the dentist
the insurance,
and the cost of food so high.

It’s embarrassing
when our friends ask
where we’re going this year.
There’s no money for vacations.
See how shabby my coat is.
Twenty years we’ve had our car.

I gave to the food bank,
the fundraiser.
There’s no room in my house
for you.
It’s all we can do to keep
ourselves going,
what with job cuts coming.
It might be me next.

What if it’s me next?
I have to save.
Don’t look at me like that.
It will be me next.
You won’t be there.
There’re be no one to give me
a blanket, a place to sleep,
to hold me as I cry.

Go!
I have to get to the store,
finish this paperwork,
pull weeds,
anything but look at you.

Pray for me.

THEME: Childhood Hunger

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.

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!

​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

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

                              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.