A Nun Eats Out of Turn on a Fast Day Adrian Koesters The hunger not in her stomach this one that arches her back Under the stiff linen sheeting designed to fend off just this hunger Works its way into her stomach from her lips, her mouth, how to describe What it means to need this much as she faces a metal bowl Of boiled eggs in the peels she dips her hand, cupped over one Less its peel, into the second bowl of cool water to rinse the shell Bits from the flesh, pretends to drop the egg in the third bowl Brings her hand to mouth and coughs, flips the egg to her tongue behind Her teeth and closes them, careful not to allow a bulge in her cheeks Nor to let the working of the mouth over the white and yolk Show to the sister across the table, or the guardians watching in spirit She feels again that hunger that bread, if it were alive, could not ease As a voice, detached, says, “I don’t want—I can’t—” Adrian Koesters holds an MFA in poetry from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and a PhD in fiction and poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She currently serves as senior poetry reader for Prairie Schooner, has been assistant editor for American Life in Poetry (www.americanlifeinpoetry.org), and is fiction editor at the online journal, A River and Sound Review. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Hotel Amerika, International Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Saranac Review, Scythe, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction book on spirituality, Healing Mysteries, was published by Paulist Press in 2005. “A Nun Eats Out of Turn on a Fast Day” appears in our Winter 2012 issue.