Rachel Morgan
Case Study: Hunger
My biology teacher called mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell. Micrometer maternal organelle. Glucose + oxygen = ATP. How many ATP can be made from a honeycrisp apple? Glycolysis is a process of breaking down, but how much life from this spoonful of peanut butter? Diagnosis from insatiable hunger and thirst. Before insulin, prognosis = fatal. The starvation diet prolonged lives at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. The brain is the body’s hungriest organ. Inanition. Mitochondrial Eve, eating the apple, reuptaking what’s breaking or broken.
Mitochondrial DNA identified the Romanovs in their shallow roadside graves. From the tsar’s femur is the mutation of heteroplasmy bonding him to his living relatives. The tsarina to hers with mitochondria’s simple wedding ring of 37 gems into genes. In the House of Special Purpose, the bullets ricocheted off the daughters, so the firing squad resorted to bayonets. Their bodices lined with over 300 years of diamonds and precious stones. A tiara at the waist. Grandmother’s emerald covers a spleen.
thrice boiled cabbage
it is recommended 400 calories or fewer
5 year old boy weighs 27 pounds
1 oz milk punch with no sugar
have you ever been so hungry you’d eat
the songbird from its cage
and its bird seed
it takes 2 ATP to make 4 ATP
if there’s nothing to eat
a body eats itself
an empire eats the same
once a diamond could only cut a diamond
flesh can be cut with paper, a fingernail, pins and needles
Lacuna
the lull and hush
of womb O tomb
sound inside a body
meat of a heart
language gives us orphan
renders blood’s irony
lochia micrometals
iron and copper
we give language
widow and widower
and her still mother
cutlass to the flesh
a wound O wound
her henceforth forsook
empty womb craves
empty tomb
a cleansed cutlass
in close chambers
inside every mother
grew a eulogy, an ode,
an O and O and O
Approaching Zero
a millionth of a billionth
of a billionth of a billionth
of a centimeter—
smallest unit of measure
where the watershed’s
sharply east, grandiose west
and what sextant
apprehends the bloated
nucleus as it’s commandeered
for wreckage and all
these stars
just what
are they for
in other light
Rachel Morgan’s work appears in Best New Poets 2024, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review and Shenandoah. She is an editor for the North American Review, and a 2024–2025 Iowa Artist Fellow.