Starving
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Starving
At first it was neglect of ephemera: bright yellow finches darted from the empty feeder hung from the birch tree in the backyard, a film of saccharine dust gleamed on the dresser in the bedroom upstairs. Progressively, neglect gave way to a more definite desire. Gradually, you let loose a lifetime of grazing, unremarkable hunger, forgetting whole mouthfuls of food, hollow as a girl on a nervous first date, as though decorum dictated it; feeling, in time, a calm in the gut as deep as Lethe. Naturally you grew thin—bones a stark armor articulating breastplate, torso, thighs—and light as a tune until, lifted up by a sheer wind a little like will, you landed on a sugary patch of ground midway between the Maryland hills and the blonde and grey-green fields of Franklin County, not waiting but idle, rusty arms at rest, unused to the work of rising and falling, the frenzy of forcing their way through air. It’s left to me to remember now how light you were when I lifted you for the first and last time and left you to the abandon of an insatiable earth. [End Page 144]
Patricia Phillippy is a professor of English at Texas A&M University (College Station) where she teaches early modern literature and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. She is also author of Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture, (Johns Hopkins University Press), Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (Bucknell University Press), and Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge University Press).
