Hunger

I fast, intermittently
As part of a health routine.
Going for ketosis
to lose the waistline.

The waste lines up
on the shelves of my kitchen
Sweets, cheeses, and both kinds of bread

bred a lust for luscious lunches,
divine dinners, big breakfasts
and packed on the weight.

Wait 12 hours
to eat again
and that should do the trick.

Tricky business, fasting.
Choosing to abstain
When the fridge is full.

Fully aware of the difference
Between this hunger and that
that has waited much longer than I

I cannot even imagine.
The child in the classroom
The parent at work

​Fasting, intermittently
To save money for rent.

Click to hear the poet read the poem.

Hollow-Eyed Hunger

the shopping list
on the fridge
gets longer
as portions
shrink and
hollow-eyed hunger
deepens

if tears and worry
could be cashed in
like chips at a casino
there’d be no
waiting in line
at the food bank

no asking
over and over
how all those hours
at a job — or two
don’t add up

This poem won first place in the 2023 Babylon Village Arts Council Poetry Contest and was first published in Disconnects and Other Broken Threads by Emily-Sue Sloane (The Poetry Box, 2024).

​A Nickel Apiece

A beat-up Corolla idles,
trunk agape, as a woman
dressed in drudgery
inspects a recycling bin
at the end of a driveway
waiting for the town
to collect and sort
and do whatever it is they do
with the plastic, metal
and glass containers
in the name of protecting
the environment

which they don’t say
includes the chain of profit
with its promises of freshness
in our food if not the landfills,
the sea, the air, and
in the name of easing
our angst about so much trash
and the way it can whip up
a storm so fierce
it will topple trees and carve
new ocean pathways
through island barriers.

The woman, intent
on her sifting, plucks
soda cans and beer bottles
that she’ll cash in
for nickels, winnings
she might or might not use
to buy fuel for body and car.
She feels eyes on her, looks up.
A wave to the homeowner
seals a pact of mutual
gratitude and forgiveness.

This poem first appeared in Evening Street Review and then in Disconnects and Other Broken Threads by Emily-Sue Sloane (The Poetry Box, 2024).

At the Edge of Hunger
                                          Trivandrum, Kerala, India

Lights on fishing boats
paint a necklace
on the edge of night
as they slide past land’s end
to trawl darkened depths
for their nightly haul
counterweight
to the hunger
that awaits
their dawn return.

This poem first appeared in Long Island Quarterly.

The Boy Who Eats Black Soil

The boy who eats black soil
Who feeds a mineral heart
Hunger a metamorphic pressure
               Eyes turned to schist
               Blood to gray slate.

The boy who eats black soil
Another who eats only air
And once the marrow has been
Leached from his bones, he’ll
Spread the whisper of his arms
And glide on the currents of the sun.

This world of transience
Where a child’s cry
               ​held aloft
Turns and turns in the lunar light
Like a quasar, mute and distant,
The hunger of his mind
Collapsed in upon itself.

The Voice of Her Name

The starving refugee is only starving
inside my plasma screen, the hand
she reaches out to me touched with
virtual hunger, eyes pixelated with tears.

I have no time to hold the hand
of the traumatized girl or stay tuned
long enough to hear if she’s
SyrianPalestinianPersecutedSectarian.

I have no time to guide the drone
though in my youth I was quite
the master of the joystick and employed
a touch both deft and knowing.

I have no time to stand before a gathering
of my peers and let them drink
the melting plastic of my guilt
before it reshapes into a map of America.

What I do have time for would take more time
than I have to tell. But it involves the modem
in my head and the router in my eyes
and the futile effort to unplug what’s wireless.

Tape loops no longer exist, now it’s all
digital binary code that enhances your
mother’s voice to a level of clarity
she never possessed when she was alive.

My one great-uncle drove a pink convertible Cadillac
my other great-uncle carried a gun beneath his suit.
Short Jewish men who cast a mirage of height
via the virtual reality of throttle and trigger.

Still, when he turned the key in the ignition
the sound was like sacred choral polyphony.

A sinuous streaming of harmonics.

The encoding of my desire to listen,
to interpret the braille of what can’t be touched
as I cannot touch the girl whose face
is the face of hunger, whose braille
is the voice of her name.

As If Dreams Had Any Meaning

I read and nap, read
and nap, and so the day passes;
though at day’s end there is
no network of news that recounts
the number of Congolese who die,
mining with their hands the rare minerals
that encode our desires. Or the names that day
of the raped in prison, in whichever country
you wish to choose, whichever gender
you care to know about. Or those who simply
didn’t have enough to eat as you wash your dishes
in the sink. The cat waiting to be fed.
Returning then to the room where you watch the news,
though there’s nothing new in the news of iniquity,
or the fine art we’ve made of flaying
one’s soul, so why would the news bother
reporting on things so very old?
So off goes the TV, as if offing someone’s head,
and off once more I head to bed, where I dream
the same dreams that everyone does, the ones
you can’t remember when morning comes.

Hunger

Did you take long walks in that time of our great loneliness together? Most days I stared out the window and waited like a dog for someone to come home. I noticed the big oak outside, and aimed my chair towards it at 6:30am for weeks, until its leaves shined like glass, as something awful was on its way, and the streets were empty with it. After; I fell in love with a house on my walks, overgrown with ivy, hardly visible. Rags for curtains exhaled in its windows, and a man called it insulting, but said someone was taking the mail inside. My visits like touch, and because it had survived its own ruin, I ascribed it a watchful eye, a lookout for everyone else. And I’m sure you are thinking, does he even know how he’s projecting his loneliness onto this house? We occupy things more, the more we need them. Anyway, spring came in that one hour like it always does. I spent days taking photos of flowers to exchange with unseen friends. The rule; you could not repeat that one yard full of purple lilies or spotted white foxglove, which meant going farther into the desolate streets of Queens, where I saw not even a hand disturb a curtain for hours, going from one color burst to the next; a misplaced observer beside clouds of bees who never wonder if they have a place among things, until I found what I avoided, and returned on each walk to view the ground zero of the pandemic, a block and a half from my building, outside the hospital; zero being without value. After I watched fourteen ambulances spin the street red, and a lone woman EMT driver in her cab raise an enormous sandwich and begin to cry, and after the first day the long white truck body appeared where the dead were stacked in makeshift bunk beds, anonymous to one another as children on a first night’s sleep over; we listened in our beds, up late with the insomniatic spring dark, to a far off siren growing louder, as the trees clutched their raindrops and the buildings leaned in, it came towards us, insistent as sunlight, or terrible as any kindness I could not accept, and I discovered a refrigerator on a sidewalk near the hospital, called a community fridge, with the phrase, “Take what you need, leave what you can,” for anyone hungry. I brought produce there from Kim who just bought the vegetable stand from the old Korean couple, and only asked how much do you need, and after Thursdays at 4:30pm when I met Margarita, whose Spanish I could not speak, but requested some brand of coffee from Brazil, and Amy Chen whose Mandarin I don’t speak, who texted once, ”I’m pregnant,” meaning I need more food, and after Tatiana, whose head is as big as a large jack- o- lantern, with a smile of stubby brown teeth; once put her friend Linda on the phone, who said, “You remind her of her uncle in Russia,” and after she moved with her bags, she returned, and underneath the subway she handed me a bag with Creamed Herring and Kasha Varnishkes, with a treasure of Russian breads, every shade of brown, and with Google translate failing what we wanted the other to know, one typing, the other waiting, while the rumble of the 7 train passed above, and the sidewalks of people returned to life; I was not completely grateful for; we hugged, then twice, a long time, and I hung on tight to her and she to me, and I felt all this time pressed into us.

This poem first appeared in the Pendemics Journal in the Spring of 2024.