Hunger

Food mattered most

Cutting, rubbing meat

Into its juice, bargaining with the grief

Of one last bite, the never enough

Tomorrow;

My mother’s long suffering

Glares from my hunger and face

A strength of disregarded efforts,

Human machinery unheard, unattended

Mass-producing everything

For a forgotten world of a girl;

No one, no salvation but her efforts

Bearing no fruit, no groceries to last

No hand for the weary; I drew the

Faces that covered my walls, all

The precious beasts that watched

My sleep and waking hours;

The knitted and knotted fabric

Of this poverty of hunger wailing

From rented walls;

I grew into womanly meat,

Rubbing myself into the words

Of books, waiting for the scent

Of dinner and the sound of plates

And saucepans, I read to eat;

I patrolled the self-portraits on the walls

Where light filled the belly of the forgotten;

The books, the walls, the bent woman

Who stayed filled my gut

And I grew brilliantly hungry for meat

On my bones, for theories of recognition

Foreseen in my happy beasts; I grew

Changing the world with my world

Of empty cupboards and plates;

I became brilliant, harsh, beautiful;

Woven, fixed and thought-provoked,

I am the meat of my story, the exquisite juice

And bookplate of knowledge and hunger

For the crowning tomorrow; I will be placed

Like a queen at the world’s tables; servants

Will wash my mother’s feet.