Hunger

Hunger Sharan Strange (bio) 1 Combing the papers for summer jobs nothing that seems absurd now, or the obvious hustle, was beneath us; our need was rampant as newsprint, those endless columns of pulp dreams. Not old enough for hire, I fantasized my fortune in stuffing envelopes. Seductive ads beckoned: Make $$$!No experience needed! (Just gut- wrenching desire for anything more . . . ) I’d make thousands, save the family, buy my way out of loneliness, invisibility. I sent off letters, stamps tasting of promise, expectation swelling in me like a secret. 2 I yearned for glimpses of freedom like clearings stumbled upon, meadows of unbroken green edged by trees, yet seemingly endless. Like that, but interior, as in the mind’s infinite reaches, hinted at in dreams, or the openness the heart allows each time we choose love. Going into fields where my grandmother eked out a sharecropper’s wage, before I learned they weren’t hers, they too seemed unbounded by horizon. [End Page 278] 3 What I wanted I couldn’t name, but the longing felt more real than what I could touch, constant as labor. Some nights I lay on the ground for hours, drunk with that view of the heavens, as if those thousand thousand stars each held me by a thread, their imperceptible shuffle spinning around me some cosmic cocoon. So I endured the days, and months, and years that kept me from adulthood, the time of fulfillment. Or so I thought. Growing up brought an end only to a kind of indentured servitude, taught me to distinguish loss from lack. 4 These days it’s TV commercials—the happy clan hawking cars and breakfast cereals. Anything is attainable in fantasy. It takes so much to learn just this: The things we need we don’t get in this world. Some say we’re lucky to be alive, to have our chance each day, to fight, get by. I say what’s luck, or chance, or choice for that matter? I take the offerings of this slim life, hunger, like memory, some kind of assurance, the body an open place unable to be filled. Selected works by Sharan Strange: • First Sight • Hunger • First Sight • Natural Occurrences • Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969 • Dorothy • Mule • February 19,1994 • Ash • The Unintended Life • The Factory • The Stranger • The Body • An Interview with Sharan Strange Related Articles: First Sight Related Articles: Natural Occurrences Related Articles: Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969 Related Articles: Dorothy Related Articles: Mule Related Articles: February 19,1994 Related Articles: Ash Related Articles: The Unintended Life Related Articles: The Factory Related Articles: The Stranger Related Articles: The Body Related Articles: An Interview with Sharan Strange Sharan Strange Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina. Copyright © 1996 Charles H. Rowell

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