Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Are You Hungry?
Because I could eat.
I could eat a horse, but my girlfriend wants me to cut back on meat.
I could eat this office building, all umpteen floors of it, cubicles, struts, and caulking.
I could spoon Osiris out of the River Nile and wash him down with the blood of Richard Dawkins.
I could simmer khmer in a pol pot and still have room for kim jong il with rooster sauce.
I could snatch the Lean Cuisine from the beeping microwave of my boss’s boss’s boss.
I could wolf down a vampire and sink my teeth in a zombie’s neck.
I could pick off stars like chicken feed with a peck peck peck peck peck.
I could go for a Russian sub right now and savor its nukes like so much pepper.
I could gut a thousand laser printers and feed my yawning maw their paper.
I’m kind of hankering for the dark matter at the galaxy’s gooey core.
I could detach my mandible and swallow until my midriff matched the skyline of New York.
I could shred the Great Plains and the Ukraine alike, a one-man locust swarm.
I could s’more the marshmallow moon on a stick until it’s droopy warm.
Seven spheres my caviar, seven seas my primordial soup of the day,
I jones for the bread bowl, the surf and the turf, the Prime Rib and shrimp tray,
The succulent, truculent hurricane, the delicacy of its eye,
The three worlds, the four winds, the pastrami and the rye.
Amit Majmudar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, AGNI online, Poetry, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2007 and 2012, The Best of The Best American Poetry 1988–2012, as well as The Norton Introduction to Literature, 11th edition. He is also a novelist (Partitions, 2011; The Abundance, 2013) and a diagnostic nuclear radiologist. (updated 11/2012)