poetry

The Hunger. {poetry}

 

Silent morning crashed

by knuckled knocking,

“Do you want breakfast?”

he asks like clockwork.

A man who eats to fuel

his quest for the next meal.

 

I remember the

bed-and-breakfast crawl

we made visiting New England

in late fall of the festival trees,

the first snow of Vermont

outside a barn-turned pub.

 

The magic peppered with

the strafing questions like,

“Do you want pizza?

Are we getting soft serve?”

And we just finished breakfast

not even an hour ago.

 

We laughed and sighed

heavily too mocking the man.

Mom was herself then

and could join in the jeering.

This man she married from birth,

delivering herself too.

 

Broken windows,

airless in vomitous heat

of rat breath,

this sweatshop he worked in

nearly all of his adulthood,

feeding too many mouths

that barely spoke to his image.

 

He convinced himself

from so fateful a day — stay boxed,

when only he tripped

on the rug pulled

under his feet

by friends joy riding days

to sweet steals,

jobs or dying.

 

A mind goes empty

in the cabin of fear

dank and dark,

communing with

foreign tongues,

solemn shells of skin.

Like solitary confinement

for 48 years,

no one remains.

 

So we dwell on the asking,

the feeding, breaking bread,

we two who watch

our center fold in

on herself slowly,

eeking death out slow-steady

for lack of a conversation.

 

“No, I already ate,”

he hears expectantly

but undaunted.

“Come on. You’re too skinny

and you need to eat more.”

Words endlessly cut and pasted

on a screen of our lives.

 

Other words fly

scatter shot red-orange

like those trees,

the ones in New Hampshire,

that year we traveled miles

from my rage-ful grimace,

head banging steering wheel.

 

Remind me of a father’s daughter

teetered on seesaws,

lifted by the weighted desire

dreamed in obedient love,

and grounded earth bound

to shackled birthright chains.

 

Invisible strands heated like electric coils

of metallic sin knit our knotted ties,

seemingly eternal yet dust shallow

as we journey the branches

we are and make complete.

 

The insatiable consumption of air

heats the moving parts,

wills an engine movement

to carry bodies across lands,

upon which fathers and daughters

feed the mime of time.

 

*****

wp-content-uploads-2015-02-pamelagerber-300x225Pamela Gerber is a college Instructor of English Composition, writer and blogger, who practices Yoga and teenager-parenting in Huntington Beach, California.

 

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