Gabriel Welsch

12 Dinners 

How we took our tea, 
amid gale and breeze, the wind
and its dervished delivery—

How we drew bean paste
across our brows as the planes 
circled and scarred sirens white.

How we crushed pearls of rice, 
rambutan and dragon fruit in streets
mummified with guava leaves.

We quaffed blood and oil, 
rendered suet to guzzle draughts
in a ring of chairs white and sunned.

Did we not want? Did we not 
grope for seeds? Answer our thrust 
hands, blood-sticky, and curling. 

We ate as omniscients, we ate as kings. 
We ate meat of birds from their dizzying
bones tasted a memory of land. 

Over a fence, by a spigot, a boy bent
to gape at water, its burble run 
in and out of his throat, into sunshot fronds. 

Where it grows, where it seeds and spills—
this meal, these dozen tables, 
this upended famine, empty 

as a day in wartime. Suffer for 12 
meals, hewn from dust’s village and its 
yellow houses emblazoned with want and breeze. 

Gabriel Welsch was born in the U.S. state of Maine and is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and works as a vice president for marketing and communications at Duquesne University.