Famished, he did not understand hunger
until it fueled a metamorphosis. An animal
does what he does. A boy, thin and lithe,
grows with each taste: his mother’s milk,
a crabapple pawed from its branch. Later,
a man’s tongue. Come spring, fur meadows
his once-pink skin, hangs loose from a belly,
from fragile limbs. Soft, love can leave one
hollow—the mother gone now, the lover off
mawing pupae and eggs from a hive’s thin
crevice. He imagines a face swollen with stings,
the bees shaken from his pelt like river water.
Man a consequence of indulgence, he forages
every sweetness in memory, knowing nothing
lasts. There’s wilderness everywhere, cruising
a truck stop off I-80 as he might an aspen grove
along a ridge of the Wasatch, finding pleasure
without prey or conquest. Hunger’s season end-
less, to sate it merely temporal relief. One night,
it relents, following a man out of the stall, belly
full, the whole of him tingling. He palms the tile
wall until it ends. The sky is quiet and rapturous
as that touch or cold air blown against his body.
Here, he emerges from metaphor: wet-mouthed,
sore, and ready beneath the nearly-empty moon.
