Hunger
       

What feeds us is not the nipple.
It is the art of the nipple, its frame.

We take it all in, dousing the brain,
that mushy ruby

seduced by beauty, tricked
by spongy love.

We thought it was impossible,
but a tree crashed through a room

in our house and we were okay
with that. We burned it in the fire, the blaze

of life always burning. And the birds,
nesting, we saved their feathers

but burned them too. We ate their bodies.
We drank the ink

from the tree's berries and were finally able
to sing, to let the music

and language and grunts separate
from our bodies and decompose.

No, it is not the nipple that creates us,
it is the nipple that overfeeds us

until we run out of room in our attics
hovering like satellites over our heads.

Meanwhile, the grasses nod with assurance
and flick like wrists of conductors?

This is for you to decide. I put the mower in
the garage and pulled up a chair to watch

the wind shake the cold and fill its void
with more cold. I twisted my hair and bit

the tips of my fingers waiting to see what else
would come crashing down.

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Copyright © 2013 Michelle Bonczek All rights reserved
from The Art of the Nipple
Orange Monkey Publishing
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission