Hungry Father Lies and the Scared Daughter

There is a mistake on the 30/30 Project site today. The wrong poem was accidentally published for Day 7.

I am sure it will be fixed as soon as the U.S. work day begins, but I did not want to let the day pass without sharing the correct poem here. The poem for today is called “Hungry.”

Thank you to Callie Tolman for donating. That gift means a great deal to me. I am now halfway toward my goal, and I am grateful for every person who has read, shared, encouraged, or donated during this project.

If you like my work, please consider donating to Tupelo Press.

Some poems arrive with corrections, and some arrive carrying the whole room with them.

Day 7 correction

The 30/30 Project asks poets to show up every day. That sounds simple until the poems begin demanding more than discipline. Some days the poem is a window. Some days it is a door. Some days it is a locked room that has waited years for anyone to touch the handle.

Today’s poem is one of those locked rooms.

Because the wrong poem appeared on the project site, I wanted to make sure the correct Day 7 poem was available. The sequence matters. The day matters. The emotional temperature of the work matters. When a poem is misplaced, even by accident, the thread of the project can feel interrupted.

This poem belongs here, on Day 7, in this stretch of the 30/30 where endurance and memory begin speaking to each other.

Hungry

Into his stomach of paranoia, that’s where my father swallowed me. Into his lies, where fear created me, puncturing my chest like bullets directed at me by his past experiences with women, by what he assumed my nature to be. He abandoned the idea that I was innocent. In place of that concept, he put before me a mannequin to model my behavior. And for my education, a dog-eared issue of Penthouse Forum, where nightly I fingered through the uncertain bedroom linen of strangers. From the models of my existence— the blonde, the brunette, the redhead— where white playmates reigned over my bedroom sheets and never opened their eyes or offered tea and biscuits or any sort of comfort for the scared daughter of a young, dying Black mother.

The poem speaks from a room where innocence was replaced with fear.

What hunger means here

The title, “Hungry,” does not point only to food. It points to appetite, power, fear, projection, and need. It points to what a parent consumes when they make a child responsible for their own wounds.

The poem begins with the father’s “stomach of paranoia.” That image is physical and psychological at once. The speaker is not merely misunderstood. She is swallowed. She is taken into a system of distrust before she has the chance to define herself.

That is one of the deepest injuries in the poem. The father does not respond to who the daughter is. He responds to what he fears she might become. He sees her through “his past experiences / with women,” and then treats those fears as truth.

A child cannot argue with that kind of projection. A child can only survive inside it.

The poem makes fear feel bodily. It “punctures” the chest. It behaves “like bullets.” The danger is not abstract. It is felt in the body before it can be understood in language.

That is one reason the poem has such force. It does not explain trauma from a safe distance. It shows how fear enters the body and becomes part of the child’s education.

The mannequin and the magazine

The father “abandoned the idea / that I was innocent.” That sentence is devastating because it names a theft.

Innocence does not disappear on its own here. It is taken away by an adult’s imagination. The father replaces the child with an object, “a mannequin / to model my behavior.” That mannequin is not alive. It does not want. It does not speak. It exists to be arranged.

The image suggests a child forced to study womanhood through a dead form. A model without breath. A performance without care. A body without interior life.

Then comes the magazine, “a dog-eared issue of Penthouse Forum.” The detail is deliberately uncomfortable. It should be. The speaker’s “education” happens through sexualized stories of strangers, not through tenderness, safety, or honest guidance.

The poem does not describe this as curiosity. It describes it as a curriculum imposed by fear and neglect. The child is left to “finger through the uncertain / bedroom linen of strangers,” searching through adult fantasies for some usable form of knowledge.

What kind of knowledge can a frightened child make from that?

The poem refuses to soften the answer.

A damaged education can come from what a child is left alone to study.

Race, gender, and the models of existence

The final stanza widens the wound.

The speaker names “the blonde, the brunette, the redhead,” and then identifies them as “white playmates.” These figures “reigned / over my bedroom sheets.” They become the models available to her, the images set before her as examples of womanhood, desirability, and power.

But they offer no care. They “never opened their eyes.” They never “offered tea and biscuits.” They do not comfort “the scared daughter / of a young, dying Black mother.”

That ending changes the whole room.

Now the reader sees not only a daughter shaped by a father’s paranoia, but a Black daughter trying to understand herself through images that do not hold her. The models available to her are not maternal. They are not protective. They are not reflective. They are not kin.

The mother enters late, but her presence alters everything. She is “young” and “dying.” The daughter is scared. The father is consumed by suspicion. The available images of womanhood are white, sexualized, silent, and indifferent.

The poem does not need to tell us that this is lonely. Every object in the poem has already told us.

Why this poem belongs in the project

A daily poetry project can create the illusion of speed. One poem each day. A new page. A new offering. A new deadline. Yet poems like this one ask for slowness.

They ask the reader to sit with discomfort instead of hurrying toward a neat lesson.

The poem also shows how private harm often arrives through ordinary objects:

• A bed

• A magazine

• A mannequin

• Bedroom sheets

• A cup of tea that never comes

• Biscuits that never appear

• A mother whose comfort has been threatened by illness

  
  

These objects do not behave like props. They carry emotional weight. They show how a child’s world can be furnished by other people’s damage.

That is part of what poetry can do. It can take the objects people dismiss and reveal what happened around them. It can make visible the training a child never asked for. It can name the difference between being seen and being projected upon.

Gratitude and the halfway mark

Thank you again to Callie Tolman for donating.

I am halfway toward my goal, which feels both encouraging and humbling. The 30/30 Project is not only a writing practice. It is also a way of supporting Tupelo Press, a press that continues to make room for poetry and poets.

Every donation helps. Every reader helps. Every person who returns to the work helps keep the project alive.

If this poem reached you, unsettled you, or stayed with you, please consider donating to Tupelo Press in support of the 30/30 Project.

A small act of support can help keep the poems coming.

What remains after the correction

The site mistake will be fixed. The correct Day 7 poem will find its place.

What remains is the poem itself, standing in the open now. It is a poem about fear, projection, race, girlhood, and the hunger that can live inside a family. It is also a poem about naming what happened without dressing it up for comfort.

Thank you for reading the correct Day 7 poem. Thank you for staying with the work.