Michael Baker
Audrey Hepburn Has Cancer
She said all there is is tuna salad
and I said nothing after fucking tastes good
and this damned door doesn’t close correctly
into the battered oak of this falling frame
on Kling Street in Akron. I go outside
unprepared for the first snow, a twitchy rain
that sucks up the light before moving east
with headspeed to other nervous onlookers,
Erie, Buffalo, Boston, and then disappearing
into the cracked-in-half Atlantic. My sock prints
are soon covered over.
We have to spell with lower case
“The King Of The World” before historians
mock our reverence and turn our allegiance
into irony. He sits in the corner
of a room in the vacant palace, unaware
that farmers are paid to burn crops,
that slaves are too bored to clean up, that movie stars
become sick then die: we must
pack our things for Goodwill and hand
our shocked sisters our soiled shirts.
Experts don’t fool us. Our calories
burn bright for many seconds, so we stay stuffed.
We can catch a charter from Cairo
and from there plead with mules
to carry us, we who have nothing, to Somalia,
then to this town that last year
was a city, humbled by the desert
that allows second chances. We could write
“at night the country greatly cools”
but we don’t have time for punctuation and anyways
the opaque moon forbids it and anyway the land
is silent as a disease, we would write,
and anyways the kids are too weak to cry
or move into our cots and anyways
the answers are exactly the same as before:
Water. Stone. Hunger. Tumor.
