‘famine’

Photographer D. L. Pravda keeps it together either by jamming distorted reverb juice into his ears or by driving to the country and disappearing into the woodsfarm dimension. Recent photography appears in Santa Clara Review, Peatsmoke, Trace Fossils Review, and Streetlight Magazine as well as poetry in Roanoke Review and Spring Hills Literary Magazine. Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.

famine

i have bitten the moon down to the rind  

spat out stars like seeds 

onto a night too small for them  

constellations bloom where fallen stars land  

and a galaxy stirs in the hollow of my chest  

what does it mean to carry a hunger you cannot name?  

to swallow silence like bread?

to drink the dusk like wine?  

i press my palms to the sky’s open mouth  

trace universes on its teeth  

and wonder if the stars are just echoes,

light from a fire long forgotten

still burning, burning, 

and burning

Megan Moss is a writer and author from Kingston, Oklahoma. She has been published in her university's literary journal Originals, as well as The Madison Review, and has been a featured reader at the Wednesday Night Poetry event in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She is a senior at East Central University, majoring in English.