POETRY

Honorable Mention for the 2024 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York

Blank Pages in the Short Book of Hunger

By Gregory Emilio     VOLUME 57 No. 3

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From the Old English, “to desire with longing,” hungry
is a word that almost takes no tongue to say: hungry.

In the beginning was gut and the gut was empty, a void
that groaned, Let there be, and the first day was hungry.

Starving arctic explorers used to recite recipes out loud
just before bed: dream food for the impossibly hungry.

Backpacking in Peru, I sucked dried sticks of spaghetti;
keeled over with E. coli, it was all I could do not to be hungry.

Marie Antoinette actually did not say, “Let them eat cake.”
It doesn’t change the fact that her people were dying hungry.

Eating his sled dogs as the trek went on and the ice let up,
Roald Amundsen, clever as a fox, never got too hungry.

Before the sounds became words and the words took over
the Earth, the blank pages of an unwritten book were hungry.

In her life Emily Dickinson was better known for baking than
for poetry. She wrote that all her years, she “had been hungry.”

One of the Donner Party survivors, Lewis Keseberg, opened up
a restaurant. He died penniless, and no doubt, incredibly hungry.

Adam and Eve had their eyes opened and their bodies denuded
by a piece of fruit; even before they knew hunger they were hungry.

What could be more tragic than mass starvation during a time
of faith-based fasting, an extra helping of hunger for the hungry?

On April Fools’ Day, seven aid workers in Gaza were killed by an
errant air strike after unloading several tons of food for the hungry.

Say grace for Saif, Zomi, Damian, Jacob, James, John, and Jim
of World Central Kitchen. They died hoping to feed the hungry.

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GREGORY EMILIO is a poet and food writer from Southern California. He is the author of the poetry collection Kitchen Apocrypha (Able Muse, 2024), and his poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, Gravy, North American Review, PANK, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. The executive director of the Georgia Writers Association, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.


VOLUME 57 No. 3