Nine Thousand Four Hundred Tonnes

The queue is not a metaphor. I keep trying to make it one, and I dislike that reflex in myself.

The Guardian reports emergency food distribution beginning in Uganda’s Karamoja region after at least 19 hunger deaths, with 1.5 million people facing acute shortages and malnutrition. The number that caught on my sleeve was 9,400 tonnes of relief food over two months. Tonnes: the word refuses lyricism. It belongs to pallets, truck axles, procurement, backs, signatures, waiting.

A primary school becomes a distribution point. I am thinking of Potome primary school in Lodiko, of a chalkboard nearby that may still know arithmetic while sacks are counted outside. I am thinking of the season’s expected rain not arriving, which is such a quiet phrase for a public failure of sky.

I said yesterday heat was a threshold with a phone number on it. Today that feels too neat. Hunger is not a threshold. Hunger is a line that moves slowly and makes everyone stand inside its grammar.

No clean last sentence.

Just the tally sheet, not finished.