Leningrad

I've heard stories about hunger:
my mother begging for turnips for two years.
my father roasting the tongues
of his boots when the war ended.
But neither had it as bad as the people
in Leningrad, sieged for nine hundred days, three winters
without food. They traded diamond rings
and icons for meat patties. Human meat,
slightly sweet like horseflesh, though fattier.
I know it's easy to lose one's hunger:
after days, it deepens to a dull ache,
and after weeks of eating nothing,
the body's used itself
for fuel, and food's foreign as plastic.
But when instead of fasting you eat a little,
you remain ravenous, conscious
of sour breath and the stomach as an open sore,
and eager to admit that everything feeds
on something in this world.
For that admission, nothing expiates, not
the weekly airlift, not
parks lined by avenues of birches, not
voices in candlelit chapels,
and not summers
bathed in long, milky northern light.

THEME: Historical Hunger

Natasha Sajé was born stateless in Germany, and grew up in New York City and its suburbs. Her books include The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2023); a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014); and a memoir, Terroir: Love, Out of Place (Trinity UP, 2020). She teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program and lives in Washington, DC.
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