Hunger
I set the table for you.
I buy a longer table to set for you.
I run to the upstairs neighbor’s and ask them for all the tables they have,
I push their tables to the end of my new, longer table,
which is running out the door now--
when I try to drape a tablecloth over it,
I look like a magician brandishing scarves from my sleeves,
but that’s not the only thing I need to conjure:
If you want to know everything about me,
I need to make more for you to know--
Have you heard about my balsa planes?
Have you heard about my attic full of crickets?
I put a curse on nightshade, I blush
pints until the blood bank gives me cookies
or I faint. I was a boy detective,
I was the stabbed mayor of Gdansk,
I spent my summer as a unicorn with two black eyes,
I taught myself the language of speedbumps under a sleeping car,
I can organize my spices by color or feeling,
I was a mountaineer, a satellite, a master quilter,
a murderous doctor fogging the glasses above my face mask
with the heat of my simmering rage.
I wore floral dresses, I wrapped my grandmother’s bones in wallpaper,
I was sired by a ravine
and nursed by an unfurling coup. My love,
stay longer.
I live by your hunger & I live by my hunger.
Like a pancake that’s just been flipped over,
heat is opening all my stomachs:
one for lunch, one for dinner, one for the future,
one for chocolate, one for you, another for you, and so on, and so on.
I have followed the chain of tables to the cafeteria and I feast
on my many choices: more Jell-O,
more Jell-O, more Jell-O, more
of the absence of foods that aren’t Jell-O.
How delicious everything is when it’s the only thing you want.
I grow fat on the turkey I turn away, and the coleslaw,
and the stalwart clumps of beans, and the orange juice,
and the slices of hard-boiled egg, and the iceberg lettuce,
and the rolls like sponges, and the soggy baby carrots,
and the tables of wetly gulping people I’ll never kiss--
I want more protein to suspend you in & ladle you out from--
How beautiful everything is when we digest it to something better:
We digest moldy cheese into penicillin,
we digest traffic into petrichor,
we digest the rich into neighbors with proportional appetites,
we digest bigots into community gardens
and date rapists into cat cafes,
we swallow cowardly headlines
and out pops the lining of a birdcage,
and then the bars, and then the bird flying away.
We digest dark alleys into shower acoustics,
we eat white knuckles
and make them into the estuary between one body and another.
We digest hunger into curiosity,
doubt into faith,
we eat the potential energy between cynicism
& hope & we grow to fill the cafeteria
& then the parking lot & then the school
& the campus and the town with the house with the table sticking out of its door
& the country
& the country & the international trade agreement
& the sun breaking over the furthest place you’ve ever been
& the moon dodging to make way for it
& lonely, demoted Pluto
& the only other planet with life on it in the whole universe
& blank space
& blank space
& [ ]
& [ ]
until we are two universes
trading blue whales,
breathing the same breath back and forth
until the wind is as warm as a hand between your shoulderblades.
I buy a longer table to set for you.
I run to the upstairs neighbor’s and ask them for all the tables they have,
I push their tables to the end of my new, longer table,
which is running out the door now--
when I try to drape a tablecloth over it,
I look like a magician brandishing scarves from my sleeves,
but that’s not the only thing I need to conjure:
If you want to know everything about me,
I need to make more for you to know--
Have you heard about my balsa planes?
Have you heard about my attic full of crickets?
I put a curse on nightshade, I blush
pints until the blood bank gives me cookies
or I faint. I was a boy detective,
I was the stabbed mayor of Gdansk,
I spent my summer as a unicorn with two black eyes,
I taught myself the language of speedbumps under a sleeping car,
I can organize my spices by color or feeling,
I was a mountaineer, a satellite, a master quilter,
a murderous doctor fogging the glasses above my face mask
with the heat of my simmering rage.
I wore floral dresses, I wrapped my grandmother’s bones in wallpaper,
I was sired by a ravine
and nursed by an unfurling coup. My love,
stay longer.
I live by your hunger & I live by my hunger.
Like a pancake that’s just been flipped over,
heat is opening all my stomachs:
one for lunch, one for dinner, one for the future,
one for chocolate, one for you, another for you, and so on, and so on.
I have followed the chain of tables to the cafeteria and I feast
on my many choices: more Jell-O,
more Jell-O, more Jell-O, more
of the absence of foods that aren’t Jell-O.
How delicious everything is when it’s the only thing you want.
I grow fat on the turkey I turn away, and the coleslaw,
and the stalwart clumps of beans, and the orange juice,
and the slices of hard-boiled egg, and the iceberg lettuce,
and the rolls like sponges, and the soggy baby carrots,
and the tables of wetly gulping people I’ll never kiss--
I want more protein to suspend you in & ladle you out from--
How beautiful everything is when we digest it to something better:
We digest moldy cheese into penicillin,
we digest traffic into petrichor,
we digest the rich into neighbors with proportional appetites,
we digest bigots into community gardens
and date rapists into cat cafes,
we swallow cowardly headlines
and out pops the lining of a birdcage,
and then the bars, and then the bird flying away.
We digest dark alleys into shower acoustics,
we eat white knuckles
and make them into the estuary between one body and another.
We digest hunger into curiosity,
doubt into faith,
we eat the potential energy between cynicism
& hope & we grow to fill the cafeteria
& then the parking lot & then the school
& the campus and the town with the house with the table sticking out of its door
& the country
& the country & the international trade agreement
& the sun breaking over the furthest place you’ve ever been
& the moon dodging to make way for it
& lonely, demoted Pluto
& the only other planet with life on it in the whole universe
& blank space
& blank space
& [ ]
& [ ]
until we are two universes
trading blue whales,
breathing the same breath back and forth
until the wind is as warm as a hand between your shoulderblades.
Cali Kopczick is a copywriter and freelance editor based in Seattle, Washington. She was the editor for Chin Music Press and is the production manager and story editor of the documentary, Where the House Was. Her writing is out with The Offing, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Bone Bouquet, and others.