Poem by Grace Beeler

Hunger

​It’s only in the last year, really
that I’ve allowed myself to think
about it – about
what it might have been actually like
There.
I’ve permitted myself
to read.
And once, late,
past midnight, to
view photographs
posted on the internet:
stark black and whites,
three of each person
one from each side,
one full front.
Although I was not
allowed
to stop and examine them closely, some
details were inescapable.
A woman’s wiry hair
matted into a halo around her
head as though she had
just been used to mop the
floor;
Fear, thinly
disguised as intellect,
peering shadowlike
though wire-rimmed spectacles;
Fear, bursting beneath a black silk
bosom. Fear in every eye
that catches mine.
They know.
They all know.
The photos I was looking for were not posted.
Perhaps there
was no time for foolery
and cameras on that day.
With each morsel of
knowledge I gain,
my hunger grows.
I’ve never been able to throw even
a potato skin away
but now the pots of
leftovers in the fridge
whisper insistently to me in the
night. I stumble into the kitchen not
an hour after dinner and
gorge myself on
cold pasta, congealed beans,
a sandwich with
questionable mayonnaise
which has been to a picnic at the river
and back and spent
a week in repose wrapped
in sandy tinfoil on the
second shelf, pink slices of
ham, the flesh tearing as
I hastily extract them from the plastic
encasing, explaining (as I push the soft
folds into my mouth)
to the
air
that it is allowable to
break kosher in cases of emergency.
The more I know, the
more I need to atone,
to stuff my gullet,
round my body into curves and
counter curves.
I’m doing it now, I
tell you. I’m eating a
bagel as I write, the seeds
dripping onto the
paper, cream cheese
smudging the corner
as I turn the page,
plate resting on the hill of my belly.
eating as if sheer gluttony were the antidote to
starvation. I bought half a
dozen this morning
and the three that
are left are calling
to me, plaintively
twining their poppy seeded fingers
through the razor wire,
begging.

Click on the file below to listen to Grace read her poem:

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Filmmaker and poet Grace Beeler lives in Hillsborough NC. She is the director of After the Rain, an NGO which houses both the Appropriate Sanitation Institute and the Triangle Refugee Film Project. When she is not teaching ESL at Durham Tech Community College she spends her time advocating for refugees and cleaning up urban waterways in the developing world. ​

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