You’re forgiven for mistaking
for appetite the rumble
of trucks or the clank
of mechanical digging
on farms in the valley.
It is early evening
in truffle season,
zucchini engorge the garden.
The baby boar we found and raised
with love is hung with meat.
On cutting boards everywhere,
garlic, scallions, rosemary, and mint.
Tomorrow will be five days
since eating, five full days
since apricot and crust
of bread. The elders have all come
to me, experts in psychology,
neurons, physical education.
You’re a boy, a growing boy!
they wail, You’ll waste away,
your organs will devour themselves
like in a fairy tale! Eventually,
though, they wander off.
Other children need them:
a girl who never bleeds,
one who never stops;
a boy whose tear ducts
make no tears.
Now it’s dusk. Lights flick on
in the village, stars like pinpricks
overhead. What do you think
powers them when God
has business? Within me
an engine whose fuel is wanting.
Can you hear it? It’s what you take
for distant pangs of thunder,
a storm you think is coming
in the night.
Gabriel Fried is the author of two poetry collections, The Children Are Reading and Making the New Lamb Take, and the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri and is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books.
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