Poem of the Week | May 22, 2023

This week’s Poem of the Week is “helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings” by Maria Zoccola.

Maria Zoccola is a queer Southern writer with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.

helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings

pickles. peanut butter off a spoon. that cereal
with the little blue guys on it, the gnome things in hats,
they have the cartoon where they’re all men
except for that one blond babe who struts around
in white manolos and a flirty little slip
and all the blue guys beat each other to death over her,
a blue guy massacre, a real grisly piece of television,
although maybe i’m getting it mixed up
with something else, maybe i fell asleep watching it
and kind of dreamed the rest,
maybe what i’m really craving these days is
violence, or maybe it’s still chocolate.
corn chips. sliced watermelon. microwave pizza rolls.
bags of gummy sharks. ice cream, like a lot of ice cream,
cartons of fudge ripple i pound in one sitting
with a spoon like a dirt mover, scoop scoop
down the hole, layers of white ounces plugged
right into the skin, who was that one wizard in salem
they squashed to death in a tofu press,
giles somebody, they just kept piling it on,
and that sucker smiled his bluebird smile
and asked for more. cheesecake. jelly rolls. i’m trying
to weigh myself down, and the kid’s not doing it
fast enough. a house has to settle on its foundation,
has to stuff itself with so much life
there’s no need to beg for more. triscuits, i tell him.
get me birdseed and eggshells and shards of ice.
i want to break something on my teeth. i want to crush
it so fine the load goes down like abracadabra,
alakazam, watch me make the whole thing disappear.

Author’s Note

“helen of troy catalogues her pregnancy cravings” comes from my debut poetry collection, HELEN OF TROY, 1993. Part myth retelling, part character study, the book explores Helen’s isolation and rebellion as she enters adulthood as a stifled housewife grasping for agency in Middle Tennessee in the eighties and nineties. Many of the poems in the book contain thematic or structural nods to Homer’s Iliad; in this poem, I catalogue the foods Helen is craving in a reference to Homer’s famous Catalogue of Ships in Iliad Book 2, and of course I start off the poem by transforming The Smurfs into a sort of sideways replay of the Trojan War. Helen is not a particularly maternal figure, but as a result of both her own choices and the social rigidity of her environment, few alternate life paths seem viable to her. Helen’s pregnancy is a mental and emotional battle she is waging against her own nature, one that won’t end with the birth of her daughter.