Hunger Strikes (Broken Sequence) by Victoria Kennefick
PN Review 256, November - December 2020
1. Hunger Strikes Catherine of Siena (1347–1380)
My sister taught me how.
Oh Bonaventura, they wanted
me to marry him, the slack-jawed widower.
I vomited twigs, hid in the convent,
wore a widow’s habit. The other nuns complained
until at twenty-one I met Him.
He presented me with a ring fashioned from His skin.
Told me this sliver of flesh bound us,
wait, He told me, promising it would be special.
I levitated; only ate His body, others did not
understand how good it was
to kiss His holy prepuce.
Oh, Bonaventura, I am a house of sticks,
my bones rattle with desire until I lick it.
I feel it quiver, alive on my tongue.
2. Hunger Strikes Angela of Foligno (1248–1309)
I drink pus from wounds of the unclean.
Christ, it is like water to me, sweet
as the Eucharist.
I pick
at their scabs, chew them flat
between my teeth.
The lice I pluck and let drown
on my tongue sustain me.
Lord, I am the Host.
Lead me in the light
to the summit of perfection.
I will pray and pray
and pray to you: to remain poor,
be obedient, chaste and humble.
This is all I ask. God-man, feed me.
3. Hunger Strikes Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727)
My confessor ordered her to do it,
the novice kicked me again and again.
Her shoe pummelled my teeth,
bloodied my lips. I did not stir
or whimper, I kept my mouth open.
I remained bruised for weeks.
When my face was almost pink again
He prompted me to clean the walls and floor
of my cell with my tongue. I licked
for hours, scraping up each wisp of skin and hair.
My throat became thick with cobwebs,
my mind clear as light.
4. Hunger Strikes Columba of Rieti (1467–1501)
My body is a temple I keep
clean for You, spotless –
lashing my skin so it grows
tired of bleeding.
Wearing hair shirts I cannot forget
what it means to be alert.
I have toured the Holy Land in visions.
I don’t imagine they would understand
what I see.
When they came for me, the men,
they ripped off my robes
expecting to find me virginal,
untouched.
How they gasped in horror!
How glad I was that I had used myself
like an old rag.
Beating myself with that spiked
chain shielded me,
my breasts and hips so deformed
they ran from me,
screaming.
5. Hunger Strikes Gemma Galgani (1878–1903)
Chapter 1: St. Gemma’s Birth and Early Education:
First Flowers of Virtue. Her Mother’s Death
Chapter 2: St. Gemma’s life at Home.
Her Heroic Patience in Great Trials
Chapter 3: St. Gemma’s Dangerous Illness and
Miraculous Recovery
Chapter 4: St. Gemma Tries to Enter Religion.
She is Not Received
Chapter 5: St. Gemma Receives the Stigmata
Chapter 6: St. Gemma Meets the Passionist Fathers.
More About the Stigmata
Chapter 7: St. Gemma’s Characteristic Virtue
Chapter 8: The Means by Which St. Gemma Attained
Perfection. First, her Detachment
Chapter 9: St. Gemma’s Perfect Obedience
Chapter 10: St. Gemma’s Profound Humility
Chapter 11: St. Gemma’s Heroic Mortification
Chapter 12: Attacks by the Devil1
Chapter 13: St. Gemma’s Gift is Raised on the Wings
of Contemplation to the Highest Degree
of Divine Love2
Chapter 14: St. Gemma’s Last Sickness3
Chapter 15: St. Gemma’s Death and Burial4
6. Hunger Strikes Victoria Kennefick
She punches her stomach loose, blind –
naked like a baby mole.
In the shower she cannot wash herself clean
the way she’d like. Rid herself
of useless molecules. Would that she
could strip her bones,
be something
neat,
complete.
Useful.
To eat or not to eat,
switch table sides.
Stuff cheese sandwiches
and chocolate blocks into a wide
moist orifice. Or, alternatively
zip that mouth
closed like a jacket,
a body already
contained within.
It doesn’t need
to feed.
But I have set a table for us all.
For us all, a feast!
On a vast, smooth cloth, already soiled.
Let’s take a seat, eat our fill.
You know you want to,
dig in.
Notes
All night I dream of food, Jesus take my taste from me. Rip out my tongue and I will expiate, through my bleeding for you, all the sins committed by your shrouded men.
For sixty days I vomited whenever I ate.
I was tormented by banquets.
Am I threatened by flesh or its opposite?
Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer-in-Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. Her new collection, Egg/Shell, is published by Carcanet.
This poem was featured in PN Review 256, November - December 2020, and later published in Victoria’s debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (2021). Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.
Much can be said about this group of poems, but I will limit myself to this: those images that the poems paint are to be appreciated as fine poetry. One can see how well the lines are written and the read they give is interesting.
A poem worth one's time. Good read!
So glad you posted this. I am reading her new and excellent volume, 'egg/shell' at the moment.