In this week’s poem, Molly Hogan’s “On Eating Your Emotions,” a woman considers the manifestations of her grief. I love how sensitively and plainly Hogan grounds these lines in the experience of the body and how the speaker is able to both sit with her pain and wonder at it.

Hogan is a second-grade teacher who lives in the Midcoast and enjoys writing and taking pictures. She writes regularly on her blog, and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in a variety of places, including Imperfect I and Imperfect II, Two Truths, and a FIB Poetry Anthology.

On Eating Your Emotions
By Molly Hogan

They say “Feed your sorrow”
or is it your fever?
Either way,
my grief is ravenous
two-handed greedy
mindlessly stuffing in handfuls
of sweet empty calories

But still
I feel taut and drawn
ropy and sinewed as rawhide
My newly rounded flesh
perplexes me

There’s such a disconnect
between the increased weight
of my breasts
the extra padding at my waist
and the lean pained straining
of my heart.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “On Eating Your Emotions,” copyright 2022 by Molly Hogan, appears by permission of the author.

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