Ellen June Wright
Hunger
Too early, I wake to the accents of another episode
of a British crime drama still playing.
It nightly eases me to sleep like a bedtime story.
I’ll not taste anything for hours.
What I hunger for is words—to capture them,
pull them from the air like house flies, impale them
in lines that won’t make sense for months.
In the distance, I hear the train scream into town
warning everyone out of the way.
It took a man’s life last summer.
His twisted bike wheel and sneaker left behind.
As the sun comes up, jets fly low.
It seems I’m on the landing field.
Overhead their monstrous engines roar.
Ellen June Wright reads “Hunger”
Ellen June Wright is an American poet with British and Caribbean roots. Her work has been published in Plume, Tar River, Missouri Review, Verse Daily, Gulf Stream, Solstice, Louisiana Literature, Leon Literary Review, North American Review, Prelude ,and Gulf Coast, and is forthcoming in the Cimarron Review. She’s a Cave Canem and Hurston/Wright alumna and has received several Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.