"The Hunger Artist"

| By Lauren Taglienti |

[Photo by Joe Kritz via Pexels]

“The Hunger Artist”

By Lauren Taglienti

My body lacks survival skills:

The “basic” need of living,

To be alive,

In some imbalanced form of homeostasis,

It can barely manage.

I will not eat for hours, for days,

Under compulsion,

And for simply no other reason. 

I feel hunger so intensely that it becomes my baseline,

and I can no longer feel my stomach’s mouth open like that of a starving baby bird anymore,

Let “The Hunger Artist” be my brother in arms,

Except I’m only putting on a show for an audience of one:

Depriving my body of sustenance nurtures the insatiably curious corner of my brain that begs,

“What if we stopped?”