Famine Body

My body knows how to eat itself.

Sometimes we have to starve

when there isn't enough

to go around.

Sometimes starving is an act of love

Sometimes starving is an act of solidarity

Sometimes starving is the only way

we know how to be together.

How do I learn to eat again

when starvation is my only community?

When morsels turn to dust in my mouth

and my stomach curls into a stone

when I think of being seen

by those I wish to love me (a wolf

in the kitchen at midnight, devouring

more than my share).

Sometimes eating is an act of violence,

sometimes eating means excommunication,

sometimes eating is worse than a hungry death

because it is the loss of everything worth living for.

Now love has shifted.

Love is not starving for each other.

Love is a church in my head, knelling:

enough.

enough.

enough.

We no longer need to lovingly cannibalise each other

or offer up pieces of ourselves with the grass

for ready consumption.

Even as our famined bodies devour themselves

in the great hunger of our defiance

and the violence of our survival,

I remember:

we have always been most hungry

for each other.

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