Response to Challenge 4:

Hunger

She won't pick us. We watch her leave morning, return nights. She just passes us by. We want to tell her. We are food (though there's more to us). Take, we cry out. Rip us open, yank right now, right here. Take us. Down. Pull us. Pluck us. Go on- steal a kiss. We know she wants to. We know she would want to, being lonely and all. All her loneliness. Her lonely longing. But her eyes see only floor, weeds frustrated by with their newness, a needful speck on the ground. We whisper from up here: hold us till our flesh becomes yours. Yours ours. Don't be mistaken. We are not cheesy. We aren't sentimental. We are food. We are meant to be like this, we need this. We need her. Not yet? For now - we live for rats, in the midnight they forage. And chew without pleasure. And chew without need. Chew to fill a belly. To satiate. Just because we are food. Yet we know there is more, we hope so: awhile ago the old man talked of love; now, a wordless year. No one talks under our stalks. She should know, being smart and all, that in the far reaches of many many lands, you will find people love our kind, rounded elongated streaked with the sun's fingertips. They do not care. They know only that we are sweet. They hum as they eat, they explain as they eat, they tell long stories about where they found the last of us, when they found one of us, the perfect one of us. They speak these things with our bodies in their mouths. To get us, they climb high on haunches, over hillocks, and bends. They suffer horrible fates - stings, nicks, bared buttocks, high grocer prices, clumsy kiosk hands, but we are worth it. Because we are food. Because we make people sing. Look. Look up. Lift your eyes and see. We are here.

Jane Alberdeston