“Hunger for Something” by Chase Twichell:
Sometimes I long to be the woodpile,
cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,
or even the smoke itself,sinewy ghost of ash and air, going
wherever I want to, at least for a while.Neither inside nor out,
neither lost nor home, no longer
a shape or a name, I’d pass throughall the broken windows of the world.
It’s not a wish for consciousness to end.It’s not the appetite an army has
for its own emptying heart,
but a hunger to stand now and thenalone on the death-grounds,
where the dogs of the self are feeding.
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(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Nick Harris)
The Dish 