​Ate too much
 
Did it again.  Ate too much and feel awful.  There are so many reasons why-
It shouldn’t go to waste,
It cost a lot to bake,
Such wonderful taste,
But, really, the whole cake?
 
Did it again. Ate too much and feel guilty.  Reasons to be ashamed -
Think of one’s health,
Of one’s heart,
Of one’s weight,
Of one’s delight in eating the whole damn cake!
 
Did it again.  Ate too much and swear that tomorrow –
It won’t be the same,
Gluttony will be tamed,
Salad and fruit for health’s sake,
And besides…
there is no more cake.

​Blaming hunger for thoughts of food
 
Oh, I wish I weren’t so hungry.
I know.  I’ll think of something else.
That is a pretty bird in the tree.  I wonder how it would taste. 
The bee is drinking from the flower. I wish I were a bee.
Think of something else!
The sun feels good on my face, the dirt soft beneath my feet. If only they made my stomach better…
Maybe, I’ll lie on the ground to let the sun and soil warm me. I can watch the clouds.
That one looks like a chicken! There goes a yam. There’s a bowl with fufu!
Aiee, I wish I weren’t so hungry.
I’ll roll on my side. Maybe it will feel better that way.
That goat is eating a piece of cardboard. It looks so contented. Maybe cardboard is good!
No!  I will not steal from the goat. I’ll roll the other way to not see the contented goat.
A mouse is running down the leg of the empty oba. Its cheeks are full!  Even the mouse has maize to eat!
If only I weren’t so hungry!
If I roll on my stomach I’ll only see the ground.  I won’t be tempted to think of food. 
I’m so hungry, I’m sleepy. So sleepy, I’m drifting.  Drifting and dreaming…
of something to eat.
 

​Dr. Cardwell is a food security expert.  In 2016, she joined the Oklahoma State University as Director of the National Institute of Microbial Forensics in Food and Agricultural Biosecurity & Professor, of Biosecurity and Microbial Forensic Sciences.  From 2001-2016, Dr. Cardwell was a National Program Leader, with the United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture in Washington, DC. She has also served as an Advisor to the World Bank.

Dear Food Pantry Critic,
When it is somebody else’s fault,
You don’t have to do anything about it,
And that is hunger.
When it is somebody else,
You don’t have to do anything,
And that is hunger.
Sister, you are one fine one to talk
About hunger, about the food pantry
Calling out for donors, calling out
For sugar-free jam, as if
That is all they called for.
You say the fact is
Sugar-free jam has nothing,
No nutritional value at all.
Since you have the food pantry
To blame, you don’t know anything
About hunger. Hunger.
You don’t know anything
About that bright spot jam-joy brings,
About berries, how those jeweled beads
Surprise sunlight, highlight
A day’s forgotten face.
You don’t know anything at all
About hunger.

A Ph.D. student concentrating in Integrative STEM Education at Virginia Polytechnic and State University, Mattie Quesenberry Smith is an English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, and at Blue Ridge Community College, Weyer’s Cave, Virginia.  She is also a writer. Her recent work has appeared in Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Anthology, Dappled Things, Dark Matter, Driftwood Press, Floyd County Moonshine, The Red Earth Review, and The Timberline Review.  She lives at the foot of Little House Mountain in Lexington, Virginia.

Mulberries
When the white mulberries ripen
on the tree in my backyard,
how do the birds know that the time is ripe
for picking?

Does the tree beckon?
Does one alert starling or grackle tell the others?
Do the mulberries send out their scent to the rain, on the breeze?
 
Such abundance,
the berries dance with the green leaves
until most disappear into the beaks of baby birds
fed on this springtime plenty, soon gone.
 
Be like the tree. 
When you have plenty, plenty to share,
do it now, in season, while the fruit is ripening.
Don't wait until the sun and wind say "dry up"!
Don't wait for a better time than now.

Elizabeth Stanley served as president of Berks Bards, a non-profit poetry group in Reading, PA.  She hosted the annual Bard Fest each April, established in 1998.  Elizabeth produced and hosted the Bruce Stanley Memorial Poetry Series at Reading Area Community College, sponsored by the Foundation for RACC, from 1998 to 2017.  Her poems have been published in Fledgling Rag, Iris G. Press, and in The Sexuality Poems, FootHills Publishing.

HUNGERS 
So many kinds--
for touch, relationships, acceptance,
fame, success, or just belonging.
Many stem at first
from thirst
for knowledge,
but none can be
achieved or even begun
when the real hunger
is an empty stomach
at school, at home--
singly or famine by the thousands.
No grain of truth
nourishes bloated stomachs of the starving.
Hunger pangs are not just a saying
to those whose stomachs rumble night and day.
So hard to address
necessary sustenance
despite the plenty—even waste–
in the world’s overall food chain.
One job lost, and home becomes the car or street.
Or perhaps one’s village was bombed or burned
because of differences in cultures or beliefs.
Whatever the cause, the despairing need is the same--
hunger ensues. With no fixed address for help,
each is lost in the cracks
if society lacks safety nets or networks.

​Comment
Mea Culpa

—for Stewart Brand at 80

The bank marquee reads 77 degrees at 6:22 a.m.
Skies are overcast except for slim breaks north and east.
A sparrow or wren walks for a quarter block in front of me,
I think to lead me away from a nest at its personal risk.
So much for humans' corner on altruism, the lack of which
does not quell but propagates hunger across the globe.

Oil-bought politicians be damned for heating the world
—and us for not voting them out of office with cars
run on solar power to underscore the EX in Exxon.
Meanwhile—and the while is ever mean to have-nots--
great swaths of Earth turn deserts, and rivers run dry
as ice caps melt and oceans rise, warm, and acidify.

Why can’t we commit our backs to the political plow
to alter the trajectory of the Clock of the Long Now?

Ed Zahniser has published six books of poetry, including Mall-hopping with the Great I AM and Confidence in Being and other poems (2018). He retired as senior writer and editor with the National Park Service Publications Group. He is poet laureate of Shepherdstown, WV.

Picture of Ed is a "photo posterization by Tom Taylor."

​This Ridiculous Struggle

​The yearning to pin the moth just so,
is the hungry ghost.
The dark of that unquenchable maw.
Monkey mind tells us we're stuck here.
 
Even as I bathe in the orange-y, pinkest sunset on my porch,
those children sit huddled
inside themselves.
Cold or hot, dirty, bored, dirty and of course hungry.
Both occur at the same time.
The sky is a marvelous wash of lingerie hues and mesa burning.
Each wrenched away baby
frenzied by so much absence.

​Julie lives in Freeland, MD and says, “I start, make & point out things. I wonder how we got here. I live on a "farm" and herd kids & pets & groan at hubby's puns, often.” 

Jeffrey Banks, poetically known as "Big Homey" has had opportunities for his artist activism as an advocate against homelessness recognized nationally through presentations at universities, conferences and churches. His work in this arena has been recognized by notable figures such as Dr. Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Richard Gere and NBA All-Star Allan Houston. In 2019, his poetry was featured in the National Association of Poetry Therapy Annual Conference and published in their anthology.

Serve Rice in Everything
 
Poor, fuels the imagination,
allows us to make 5 children believe,
popcorn for dinner, 3 nights in a row, is a treat.
 
Hard-up pushes my sister to learn
15 ways to fix potatoes, and that
adding rice in everything makes it go further.
 
Broke drives a single mother’s
$40.00 car, which runs on gas
by the gallon and daily silent prayers.
 
Bad-off demands a space heater in only 1 room,
an open gas oven with nothing baking,
tattered quilts over multiple sleepers.
 
Penniless lives on the street corner hosting
the Viet Nam veteran, the crack addict, and the
lost one with a cardboard carton house.
 
Down-and-out dwells in an un-insulated, rented house
with mold so bad the cabinets can’t be used
and the shower cleaned before anyone gets in.
 
Poverty walks beside the woman with dreams
as rundown as the heels of her white,
$6.00 flats, sloshing through November sleet.

Hunger down the Block
  
Michelangelo kicked his Moses in the knee
to make him move.  A kick in an empty stomach
took me home everyday summers:
canned tuna fish, mashed potatoes.  I wished for
more but ate whatever was dished out. 
 
Satisfied, I bit my lip to see my playmates
wrapped against the afternoon, their pools of septic fate,
and grew to know their upsurge, stealing food --
the upshot of their munching mouths,
their slow desire for any edible, half-eaten food
‘down the hatch,’  their laugher -- imagining
lives that swallow trout and sauerkraut.  
 
I post small gifts, drop coins in outstretched hands,
relive the fear, reflect what turns my stomach.

William Rivera has three full-length books, and one chapbook, of poems: Buried in the Mind’s Backyard (Brickhouse Books, 2011): The Living Clock (a chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2013); Noise (Broadkill River Press, 2015); and Café Select, with reproductions by Spanish/American artist, Miguel Conde (Poet’s Choice Publishing, 2016). In recent years, he has published in numerous literary magazines, including: Innisfree, Broadkill River Review, Raven’s Perch, The Broome Review, California Quarterly, Gargoyle, Recursive Angel, The Curator Magazine, Third Wednesday, Ghazal. Lit Undressed, Blazevox, The Pangolin Review, 2River Review, Loch Raven, Dual Coast Magazine, and others.

A Lady Yells Up and Down Minnesota Avenue I'm Hungry!
 
What does hunger look like?
I follow the steps of quiet children.
Their footprints weren't light or dancing.
Bare feet drag to an abyss of undernourishment.
Such big stomachs and tear-less crying,
This is what we have seen on television.
Staring at a world away we are deceived. 
By the perception of distance--
Hunger does not notice day or night.
It is the same a gray edge of pain unbroken.
The ailing wake slow and anguished,
To the daily promise of a starving nightmare,
Every sense of enjoyment is dull to life.
We work and drive and live in circles of luxury. 
The hungry world is not our fault.
The street corner looks are drug induced.
I can waste more money with fake charities.
We demand the freedom of un-involvement.
Justifying our apathy with cynicism, 
I indict myself more than I do you.
Emancipated hands of poverty's daughters,
Dig into earth looking for a heartbeat,
Of sustenance of nutrition gold,
To follow a garden line,
To a life line of full happiness,
With every kind of fruit and vegetable,
The rich soil of giving could offer up.
But the ground is tight and hard.
What is meat but imagination abounding.
The breath is a death stench most foul.
Babies are aware that they are dying.
They instinctively suckle at the air.
Wide eyes blinking, "Feed us!"
I ignore the lady yelling. I think she looks high.

(c) Brenda Bunting

Brenda Bunting is a socially conscious Poet, Author, Spoken Word Artist and Workshop Facilitator. She is the 2019 winner of the UUCS Jazz Poetry Slam in Sterling, VA and was most recently published in, “The Daily Abuse” Collection 2018. ​