Distillations: Explorations of Hunger

In this month’s Distillations column, we explore three poems involving different twists on the mundane experience of eating and the experience of hunger. The narrators in each poem are human, and the food being discussed is not particularly exotic: risotto, soufflés, and mother’s milk. However, each poem shows hunger from an unexpected direction.

”Hungry: Some Ghost Stories” by Samantha Henderson appears in Issue 26 of Lone Star Stories and is a series of prose poems. The first of these is titled “The Ghosts in the Kitchen.” In this poem, the ghosts at first appear childish and comical:

I can feel their cold bellies pressing into my back as I stir the soup, the risotto…There are three: short; middling; and tall; like a vaudeville comedy act.

However, the poem becomes more serious when the narrator lists the only other place that the ghosts congregate, “right in the middle of the old chest of drawers that was damaged during the London blitz.”

At the end, the narrator concludes that what holds these ghosts to Earth is the same hunger that they struggled with when they were alive “on rationing.”

This idea of hunger is returned to throughout the series. In “My Uncle’s Ghost,” it is suggested that “We create ghosts because we’re hungry for them, not the other way round.” In “The Ghost on the Porch,” the narrator has a dream about her neighbor “she’d opened up a bed and breakfast in the Land of the Dead. I don’t know if that counts as a ghost.” The end of the series brings the reader back into the kitchen with the narrator and the last ghost, her mother-in-law “Sometimes she comes into the kitchen. They gather in the kitchen sometimes…” This constant pairing of the dead and the act of eating brings the ghosts back into the everyday world while simultaneously bringing a touch of the otherworld to the ordinarily mundane world of the kitchen.

“Raising a god” by M. Frost appears in the First Quarter 2008 issue of Abyss & Apex. In this poem, there is another unusual treatment of hunger. In this case, the narrator is a mother feeding a newborn god. Although the baby may be a god, he still has very human hunger:

I hold him sucking to my chest, change his mouth / from one nipple to the next, clean him, lift him to the sun.

The mother says that she does not ask why he came, but it is clear that the reality is almost to much for the god to take, “I do not blame him when he wakes, / soiled, tears stuck to his celestial cheeks, / his lungs open in infantile cry.” The most immediate expression of the god’s mortality is his hunger—“I cradle him, / bare my breast.”

”The Passionate Oven” by Rachel Swirsky appears in Helix #8. This poem is the most earthy of the bunch. At first, all seems innocent, “Mr. Barowicz is a gourmet chef. / His spatula, teasing, stirs milky sauce…” However, towards the end of the first stanza, the innuendos in Swirsky’s word choices become unavoidable “the warm, secret cavity / nestled behind the oven’s modest door.” In the second stanza, the secret is out “Small wonder the oven has fallen in love.” There is no longer any room for modesty and the poem continues with “raise his soufflés… brown his meat to firmness” and many other euphemisms that would be simply shameless if we weren’t talking about pastry products. The other poems may have more sophisticated takes on hunger, but sometimes “Flames ignite the pastry, consuming it / in passion’s ecstatic, blistering fire.”

Each of these poems shows hunger in a new light, whether it is that of the formerly mortal, the immortal, or in an appliance’s unnatural enthusiasm for its work. These poets explore new ways of thinking about one of the most routine human needs.