Schmuckumentary

We are lucky—
we can leave the ground.
The earth makes its claim.
We answer
with flight.

I do not remember
when the hand began
interrupting the morning,
holding bread
already torn into smaller futures.
We gathered—
accepted the terms.

I took what I could carry
in the beak I was given,
this small allowance
to continue.

Crumb.

It marked the place
where the whole had been.

The hand would open.
Something diminished
passing for generosity.
We pecked
until the ground was bare.

—

Once, flying past a window,
the impossible object—
round, intact.

No apologies in its circumference.
No negotiations at its crust.

Even through glass
I could smell it—
sugar loosening in the heat,
butter confessing its animal past,
fruit breaking its skin.

It did not fall.
It did not break.

It simply was—
whole
the way the sky is whole,
the way the egg is whole
before the crack.

I did not know
hunger had an opposite.
Not fullness.
Refusal.

Are crumbs enough
for wings that cross cities,
that remember?

Survival taken
for consent.
Repetition
for truth.
The hand
for God.

—

The hand returns.
The other birds descend.

I feel the old reflex—
the beak twitching
with practiced instinct.

Hunger is persuasive.
Something in the species
remembers.

I stay.

Exhaustion
has outgrown obedience.

The crumb is not small.
It is infinite
in the wrong direction.

Starvation
is refusal
of what diminishes.

This is how I starve
the habit
that believed in pieces.

Somewhere
the whole exists—
round, waiting,
steam rising into the air I ride,
unbroken
by hands
that fear its size.

And I understand—
hunger
kills what was killing me.