They left me in the longleaf pines of Sam Houston
with a paper sack of baloney, bread, three apples.
In other years they would’ve been taken away in cuffs
for abandonment. I ate it all by noon the first day.
By the second morning the hunger had teeth.
I watched Boy Scouts from the underbrush,
their foil packets of oatmeal, their careless laughter,
and took what they left behind a picnic table,
half a Fig Newton bar, a bruised pear.
The third day I killed a cottonmouth by the creek,
chopped the head off with a flat stone,
skinned it like a green hose,
cooked the pale meat over sticks.
I ate without naming it.
The body accepted what the mind refused.
On the fourth day memory came back thin
as a pine needle:
Nancy Linberger in seventh-grade science,
skinny as the loblolly around us,
her voice steady while she spoke of other countries
where people gathered termites, roasted grasshoppers,
where the earth offered its small lives as food.
Her face lit like a candle held against the dark.
She said crawfish were arthropods too,
cousins to the cricket, the ant, the beetle,
and I had eaten them boiled red at picnics,
never thinking.
So I hunted.
I turned logs, lifted bark,
cupped my hands around the quick flicker of legs.
Crickets popped in the fire like dry twigs.
Ants curled black on coals.
A grasshopper’s wings snapped once, then silence.
I ate fast, the taste bitter-char, the crunch small thunder in my skull.
I remembered how her talk turned my stomach,
the thought of chitin, of six legs that twitch.
Now I felt only the disappointment of too few.
I wanted more bodies, more small harvests.
The hunger had made me honest.
Then the storm broke open the pines.
Lightning walked the ridge.
Thunder rolled through my ribs.
I stripped off the soaked shirt, the jeans,
ran naked into the rain,
skin stinging, mouth open to catch water.
Delirious, I ran toward the voice I could still hear,
Nancy’s calm, delicious list of what could be eaten,
what the woods had to give.
I was no longer separate.
I was the hunger, the rain, the small lives
crushed between teeth,
the forest teaching me its old, unapologetic way.
J. Alan Nelson, a poet, actor, lawyer, and journalist, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and Best Microfiction. He played the lead in the viral video “Does This Cake Make Me Look Gay,” the verbose “Silent Al” in the Emmy-winning SXSWestworld, and narrated New York Times videos on AIDS programs in Africa.
Image: Phyrexian, wikimedia.commons.org
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Heavy Feather Review 