Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-headed Calf” has perhaps gone more viral than any other poem on the internet. If younger, tumblr-era millennials were the original superspreaders, posting a now Reddit-famous webcomic of the poem on their respective feeds, zoomers transmit Gilpin’s words across newer, hipper social media platforms. For instance, I recently saw a young woman on TikTok getting the titular calf tattooed on her arm while an AI-generated voice narrated the poem in the background. The video ended with the words: “twice as many stars as usual.” But in Jaia Hamid Bashir’s debut full-length collection, The Afterlife of Sweetness (Mad Creek, 2026), which often alludes to “The Two-headed Calf,” the focus isn’t on the extra set of eyes. The focus is on the second mouth.
About the last half decade or so, hunger has become a major theme in contemporary poetry, almost surely popularized by another debut, Victoria Kennefick’s 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Eat or We Both Starve. Like in Kennefick’s, in Bashir’s collection the speakers of these poems eat. And they are good at it. Take the speaker in the poem “Good Girl,” who proclaims:
. . . I am a hunger artist. To devour is
to destroy. I can’t fast on holy days. This interior
false god feeds on meat, fat, sardines, black olives,
and all others forbidden and rotten.
As with Eat or We Both Starve, whose poems investigate Ireland’s Great Famine among other historical cases, The Afterlife of Sweetness examines particular hungers. Not just the hunger which is of a confessional, “forbidden” kind, as demonstrated above, but also, and most consistently, Sweetness examines what it is “to be a girl or a woman [who] is taught / to chew the plate only until hunger / remains.”
In the collection’s opening poem, “Stringing the Bow,” the speaker, after detailing how “an escaped two-headed / calf orbit[s] an abandoned truck,” confesses “I am so afraid of ends.” Although, throughout the collection Bashir confronts this fear through one of the most, if not the most ephemeral subject: food. Her speakers “have no trouble eating / anything raw,” and they “eat / the leftovers” till the speaker in “On Hunger,” with a Prufrockian flourish, compares herself to an oyster and exalts: “I, too, just want / to be a mouth.” But still that hunger, that hunger particular to girls or women, remains. Perhaps, like H. R. Giger, who famously kept a human skull his father gifted him at the age of six in order to face his fear of death, Bashir keeps her fear close. Like a type of poetic exposure therapy. Possibly in the hopes that, through enough thinking and writing about things that end, which, ultimately, everything does—the two-headed calf’s short, hunger-filled life and meals included—Bashir might overcome it, the fear.
However, later in the book, a shift occurs. In its last section, titled Fanaa or Unparadise, the speakers who devour in the previous poems, instead of just eating for themselves, also seek to share, to nourish others, especially lovers. I hesitate to compare this transition to the outdated notion that girls, once they reach young womanhood, must find a man whom she can and should feed. As I don’t believe this is Bashir’s intention. Bashir, I think, is attempting to demonstrate a subtler, more sincere idea, one that “frightens . . . how much we can love / when starving.” For example, at the end of the poem “The Mouths,” the speaker says:
. . . Everything is
a sign if you look closely. I wrinkle as I age—the fauna
inside ferments. I craft wine. I scrape the gleaming armor
of salmon and lay it on stone to dry. I’ve borne these
scales and created more fish. The garland of garlic knocks
against the green door and the guests step
on wintery skins. I want to feed you. I want to make
you more dinner.
And later still, the speaker in the poem “The Teeth Lottery” preempts Yeats and “eat[s] the center inward” before it loses hold. Another shift, this. It’s feasible the “center,” taken in context of the poems that precede it, refers to the stomach itself. Coming back to Gilpin’s calf, with its two heads and empty, rumbling, four-compartment stomach, the reader might chart their path through the collection’s three sections by using this “freak of nature” as an outline—as a sign, “if you look closely” enough, for a hunger which is so impossible that even two mouths cannot satiate it before it, finally, ends in the animal’s death.
In this way, Jaia Hamid Bashir is a master of extended allusion. Like a lapidary, she has borrowed from and, at her workbench, polished a new facet on the internet’s perhaps most well-known poem. Or, more appropriate, like the speaker in “The Mouths,” who wants to make her lover “more dinner,” Bashir, with ingredients sourced from not only Laura Gilpin, but also T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and others, has crafted a multi-course meal in the form of poems and put them in a book. Nearing the last page, I began to feel like the speaker in “Stringing the Bow,” “afraid of ends.” But, like any good meal or good book, things must—end.
