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World Food Day Oct 16, 2020... We hunger for things For freedom, respect...for peace Why is food on list Waking up hungry Surviving not living means Going to sleep hungry Hungry children cry Deafening is the clamor We choose not to hear Current tragedy Capacity but no will We could end hunger Wake up and listen Finding will will show the way We will end hunger  Written by A.G. Kawamura, a third generation fruit and vegetable farmer and former Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (2003 to 2010).
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LEFTOVERS We do well. We feel safe. We will not live life off-target. Let us bow our heads, thankful for the fine-grained crust, the yielding inner crumb. The wine oaky, sweetened with song trilled on angel food tongues, we grow swollen as low-hanging fruit. Out on the street, fallen while no one was looking, the nameless siphon sustenance from their bones, hunched, rootless, left to sizzle in the skillet, so many futures fricasseed. Out on the street children spin despair’s fouled honey. All our à la mode speeches, our but for the grace quotes cannot atone for the bounty uneaten, tossed into dumpsters at end of day, our legislators pickling the batter. Out on the street a fairy godmother, hell-bent for butter. Unlike the fables– cold porridge, toxic apples, parents left with a sickly succotash of choice– she salvages second-day cuisine via cherry red hatchback. Hustles to rewrite stories, one underpass, one home delivery, one meal-sized biodegradable container at a time. First print: Sheila-Na-Gig  Kari Gunter-Seymour’s award-winning poetry collection is titled A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2020). Her poems appear in numerous journals and publications including Verse Daily, Rattle, Main Street Rag and The LA Times. She is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-6, a poetry workshop instructor, the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year and Poet Laureate of Ohio. www.karigunterseymourpoet.com
Gleaning Lining up at the food bank, neighborly encounters. I drop off pancake mix, cold sausage, chocolate milk from our fundraiser, cancelled in Covid-time. Homeless men and women on downtown streets so long pantry workers greet them as friends in strange vicinity, not entirely strangers, not completely local. Housed locals enter quietly depart quickly or accept offers for door-step delivered meals. A woman not far mails surgical masks to her roofless brother by way of a local knowing his creekside camp. Is a mendicant holding a bowl on pilgrimage less hungry than a roofless man with family keeping distance? Finger-ping of the bowl is a bell, attention to the virtue of less. Roofless man is attended by his own practical credo. In Paris, passing a child holding out her hand to a crowd rushing up a Metro staircase, woman beside her weary. Wrong train, running back down deserted steps in time to catch the woman berate the empty child. Picking these words for thought, not work, leaves me wanting more, an eater of other courses and meals to give instead of memory. Lynn Axelrod is a community organizer in her home area, a northern California coastal village. She’s been a reporter for a weekly newspaper, an environmental NGO staffer, and an (early-retired) attorney. She has an undergraduate degree in literature, pursued graduate lit. coursework while teaching freshman courses, and has studied with several well-published poets. She continues reading literature, poetry, history, and current affairs. Her work has appeared in several journals, in print and online.
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