Hunger
My kitchen is filled with boys with greasy hair & ripped jeans.
I ask them if they are hungry.
I don’t ask,
I say,
there are tamales in the freezer.
They say
but those are for you
and I tell them
they clearly only hang around white people
and that not everything is so strictly linked to
possession.
My boyfriend says to stop trying to feed his friends
and I tell him
hospitality is housed internally.
The body is the spirit’s first homeplace.
I say
the boys are between our walls, but
they fill our rooms with music and joy.
Let us fill them with a language spoken through
gentle bites and
heavy swallows.
I say
I am telling them I love them
and that not everything is so strictly linked to
possession.
My mother sends me home with leftovers every time I visit.
Some for me
and some for
my roommate.
it is indicative of a love language
I learned from the best.
She whispers I love you and thank you to the both of us
underneath the lid of
each Tupperware.
I remember the lack of room in our own fridge and I think
how annoying
and I think
how lucky.
I rearrange the food on the shelves shoving things here and there while
my roommate waits in anticipation
for a mother’s cooking on
a half-wiped table
under
a less than intimate
roof.
I make him breakfast once a week.
I am clumsy with my hands but fluent in
the language of
our palettes.
our eyes are heavy and
our stomachs filled only with
a midnight anxiety and
half a cup of
tea.
I ask him if he wants an egg.
He always agrees despite not liking them much in the first place.
He passes me a bottle of cholula.
I pick off his plate.
there is a conversation of tapping forks on teeth.
Thank you. he says.
Thank you. I say.
I love you
I say.
The room itself is silent.
clank
the silverware drops to the bottom of the sink.
Pruned fingers fling dish soap from their surface.
I always do dishes at my friends’ houses.
Whoever cooks, doesn’t clean.
My mother’s whisper creeps in between the prongs of the fork.
My friend declines my offer
as her own mother’s words create
a dissonance in
the room.
I explain
I am clearing more space we can hold for each other.
I am restoring a contrasted beauty held within a dirty but,
empty plate.
I argue both are lovely
and, life is cyclical anyway,
y’know.
Cooking and eating are both,
I would argue,
magical acts.
There is the inevitable connection of spirit,
to skin,
to substance and
just like any connective exchange,
(the psychic, the sexual)
food carries with it energy and intention
in contention with linear time.
Don’t eat food from someone who wishes you ill.
My dad’s new wife es una bruja
in every sense of
the word
contaminating a marriage using my father’s body as a vessel.
The first time my father’s new wife sent me food before meeting me
(officially, that is),
I politely declined.
The second time my father’s new wife sent me food before meeting me,
I brashly declined.
The third time my father’s new wife refused to meet me
and sent me food
I poured it down the sink
with an audience.
I watched my father swallow hard:
1) his soup,
2) his resentment,
and
3) his guilt.
I gag at his complacency and
the insistence of
her hunger.
you could at least try it
he says.
I am chopping bell peppers in my kitchen
fingers dancing carefully between spices and
the knobs of cupboards.
My wrists seem to have two left feet.
the knife slices my hand like the warning sign from a viper
and spurts blood across the counter.
It is a reminder that what I create is a reflection of who I am
and who I would like to be.
that the body and what nourishes it is connected between
blood
and
spirit.
I bandage my palm and continue making my meal.
I love you I say. I love you.
Reina Davis is a Chicana born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Davis’ work seeks to emphasize the importance of identity, femininity, and culture in order to connect with her community, and communities around her. She is an avid cyclist and is inspired everyday by the people in and around her neighborhood.
The Literary Forest Poetry Magazine 