Helen Pruitt Wallace     St. Petersburg                (Gianna Russo)
To Imagine Hunger

any kind, of which we knew little,
               lucky as we were in our childhood.
Hunger is... a wound, a lost child...

faint smell of a father’s cigar—no—      
               the red tip of it...sun
snaking through plains, jagged rocks,

or maybe just their scales, that brittle                            
               lichen lacing up, flaking?
A pause in the angle

of a wrist becomes a white anthurium
               tossed (in a gesture of grief?) there,
by the side of a road.

I remember the ache of that road.
              I watched it for hours back then:
dust kicking up in certain light,

a tinge--of what was it—hunger?
              Did it go by the name of desire?
That mad press of tires, that contact....

Originally published in Harvard Review