The poems in A Tiny Hunger are delicate reckonings that reveal themselves in the beauty of stillness. Here, grief is a widow’s perfume or a young man’s red beard, and after a hurricane, hope returns in the form of a bakery cake perfectly intact, “—every surface, whole, pearled, and gleaming.” The journey is an attentive one, cyclical, and sensory. What is searched out, what is unearthed, is sacred and ordinary and witnessed in full light— tangelos, paper snowflakes, thistle floating “like a tattered bit of angel wing.” These poems are peopled with children who offer their wonder and curiosity, “humid night leaning against/ the cool window like a cloud./ Each star in vapor, an asterisk/ with child’s face beside it, looking up.”
In a gym full of boys in Hawaiian shirts,
plastic leis thrown midair are meant to land
back over heads and ears and shoulders—
a bright, frenetic game of ring toss.
Soon the floor will clear, and we will sway
with our sons wrapped around
our middles in the brevity of a song.
Somewhere between too tight
and too distracted, the hula-hoops
orbit and the limbo stick lowers.
The night air is full of thunder
and the smoke of burning orchards.
Outside on a break between songs,
we hear a mother on her cellphone
telling someone that her son is ignoring her—
the idiot, she laments into darkness.
Through the windows and the confetti
trickle of plastic petals and raffle tickets,
another boy awkwardly dances
the same four steps his mother
is pointing out to him again—
an invisible constellation on the floor.
She is statuesque in her high heeled boots,
hair red and gleaming like Apollo’s muse.
With his small hands around her waist,
he counts each beat in earnest and holds her
like a column of tattooed porcelain—
as if he is propping her up
for all the rest of us to see.
(first published in Literary Mama)
Father Adelir disappeared into the air
on a Sunday afternoon. The current,
though sometimes fierce, had wafted him
high above the dunes, the mangroves
in sunlit estuaries where dolphins
fed on seahorses and Venus clams.
O how he had praised God
in the garbled tongue of wind and awe,
as he dangled above the earth
from a tower of helium balloons.
His shadow gliding across
a spotted dog on the beach,
the painted boats, the silvered lapping light.
He was winged, a cloud forest
untangled from its mossy precipice.
O glorious dominion, he blessed it all—
the whitewashed fishing villages,
the tiny mountains, the whole ocean
suddenly silent and alert. His only heart
beating beneath every shallow skin
stretched thin with twilight above him.
The consecrated moon,
a pale wafer on his tongue.
Back on shore, the crowd waited,
veins still lit with the morning’s mass,
until the balloons in colors of hard candy
had grown delicate as a rosary.
The congregation too far away to know
how each bead had given way,
prayer by prayer by prayer by prayer,
until all that was left were the frayed swells
and Father Adelir kneeling
with his white capped heart into the surge.
(first published in Illya’s Honey)