So many hungers in me. A gorge rimmed red with teeth howls from in my bowels. Ready to suck in and mash, tear limb from limb, the frailest offering, a bonbon. Clamp down with the weight and forgivelessness of … life. Chew and chew and chew and spew out the bits in three trumpet blasts, in thin wormy sticky gruel. Then, rock me like a baby in my belly.

So many hungers in me. I feed in words, presents, dresses, nights out, nights in, more nights out, more words. No, thrashing, this dragon teething inside me, ripping at my under-covering, wants more.

Bellowings in an empty space force me to pack myself like a drilled-out tooth. Empty space can’t come out.  I pack in biscotti, nonpareils, maybe a Mississippi mud pie or two.

Relentless come demands for chocolate bars eaten before 11 am, candies in my pockets in the bus, crumbs smashed into the corners of my bag. I acquiesce. I hide. I gorge in public. I go on.

Listen: One day, yesterday, tomorrow, I realize there will never be enough cakes and cookies and candies.

And anyhow, I can’t keep this up, chewing, though I’m not a bit tired. I spend longer and longer in the bakery, transfixed. Nothing tempts me or rather everything does.

“Miss ?!”

I’m looking for The Cookie, I want to say, to go down sweet, and soothe or suffocate the sputterings in my gut. I’m looking to say, “No more.”

I’m going to starve the bastard out  … day after day, hour after hour, night after night, coffee after black coffee. (My baby, balloon belly, I’d grown accustomed to her calls.)

So many hungers. Which one will I turn to next?

***

Janet Garber is a human resources executive in New York City during daylight hours, but at all other times, a freelance journalist, publishing articles, essays, poems, book and movie reviews, and a how-to book, I Need a Job, Now What?  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, trade journals and many print and online magazines. She has recently published fiction and poetry in Bohemia Journal, Caesura, Contrapositions, Heyday Magazine, Minerva Rising, Up, Do Anthology and Writing Tomorrow. She lives in what New Yorkers consider “the country” with her husband and two cats.