"If You Knew" - Ellen Bass

What if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the life line's crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn't signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won't say Thank you, I don't remember they're going to die. A friend told me she'd been with her aunt. They'd just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt's powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked a half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon's spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time? - 'The Human Line,' Copper Canyon Press, 2007

A WOMAN'S HUNGER IS BLASPHEMY Poem BY Ananya Chatterjee

"Where do all the leftovers go?" You wonder and I say- They slither quietly down the entrails of a quiet woman. Heaped over, a dense mishmash of colourless curries from yesterday, day before ... and forevermore Their flavors flattened beyond the realms of taste. She eats in a rush always in a rush.. eyes lowered, curtained glance... She bites her lips smeared with grub clears her throat for another lump.. For her it's another job To be done. Nothing less. Nothing more. "And then? What happens then?" You wonder and I say- And then, somewhere in the airless dark.. a shadow lurks. A shadow lying in wait. More leftovers. For her quiet entrails. Another job to be done. Nothing less. Nothing more. "How can she take this day after day.. night after night.. this decaying taste of things from yesterday.. day before.. and forevermore.. How can she stand her terrible hunger? " You wonder and I say- Shut Up. Yes. Shut up. In a world choking on leftovers A woman's hunger is blasphemy.