I have been hungry all month. There has been no cure for it. I have wanted Renee Gladman’s apple juice, the way a femme can douse you whole while making you realize you are only a desert, only a desert. I experienced a fleeting hunger for Sylvia Plath’s feverish skin, the pale honey of it though my memory insists there would be a brittle creaking were I actually to attempt to digest. I have even been hungry for Emily Dickinson’s bees, do you think they were the fat ones, round and fuzzy and a bit overwhelmed? In the desert there are only the thin bees, mean bees, bees with hard shells and rage as exoskeleton.
I live in the flatlands and I thirst for her. My days are a trajectory of the too-white sun burning its medians across my body. When I walk (sometimes I do walk) there are saguaros in her shape, mirages etching her name across my afternoons. There is no crying here, the salt balance is too precarious.
I have been hungry all month and I have walked, in moments, toward what has looked like water. No one recruited me; and I have wandered many landscapes, not lost, but hungry. Like Jonah I push against my faith only when I have been swallowed whole by the predatory instincts of the natural world. No one recruited me, but I thought I saw apples here, or honey, or the ability to make honey. Now I know the whole world is a desert, and I miss the whale.