Hoof prints of deer in the snow like two halvesof an inverted heart. Are the deer hungry?
What do deer eat in winter? It’s wrong to feed them,I’ve heard. They’ll stop foraging and starve.
*****
I dreamed a woman stood in my door selling something. I thought it was a scam and sent her away, but later
there she was in the hall of the house I lived in thirty years ago. I’m hungry, she said.
My mother and father were in my old kitchen with cabinets I painted cornflower blue and stenciled
with yellow pineapples, eating plates and plates of ham, bacon and sausage, which makes no sense
since they were vegetarians. I should have set a place at the table for the hungry woman, but I didn’t.
*****
When my first marriage was ending, I couldn’t eat or sleep, losing 35 pounds in six weeks. My friends
congratulated me and said, You look great! Skinny mini! The woman I saw in the mirror with birdcage
ribs, a belly like an empty rice bowl, and hipbones jutting like knobs on the ridge was a stranger.
Hunger was a fist in my gut. I forced myself to eat half a bowl of cereal every day but couldn’t
taste it. I drank a bottle of chardonnay every night. It warmed the hole in my heart like liquid sunlight.
*****
The hunger of the hunting hounds that visit me,trotting up the hill from the trailer down the road.
I fill stainless steel bowls with kibble and they danceat my feet when I go out on the deck to feed them.
*****
The hunger of men who entered my emptiness and left me more empty than I was before.
The hunger of a man’s mouth on mine and mine on his, of the moon that sees but does not mourn.
