I have been hungry all month. There has been no cure for it.
I have wanted Renee Gladman’s apple juice, the way a lover can douse you entirely while making you realize you are only a desert, only a desert. I have sought out 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 exoskeletal rage.
I live in the flatlands and I starve for him. 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 his shape, mirages etching his 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 predators of the 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.
