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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
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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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