A Sampling of Cake

by Bryan Edenfield

Romance & Magma

Back in the 1990s a timber company I won’t say which one cough cough began cultivating livers and other binary organs on the eastern slope of Mt. St. Helens. But my sources are angry and always in disagreement so maybe these flesh nodules grow in the shade of Ape Canyon or deep within the beast’s favorite cave.

I break to autumnal waters with dog and sunned freckles, fingers fishing through algae for one last daydream. What bloom breeds fireweeds during the wetworks of a roadtrip? What flood found history wanting within the walls of Vader’s last murder of crows? Where curves the logline to follow our sensual rollercoaster along the river brimming with fawns?

So here we are to-da-dee we camp in crisp breeze while lava bubbles up from our urban discontent. I am the volcano that swallows up lovers. I am the grin when you can’t find anything smart to say.

Alien Ritual

First stage of invasion: follow the crested bluebird through the floodwaters of St. Mark’s Square while tourists tap on their spacephones and wait for the party to end. Unsheathe the New York Times and use the plastic bag to warm your toes. Suffocate any doubt.

Stage two: chart the path of sockeye salmon and bludgeon canals with the mysteries of Galapagos. A killer whale is saved by a terror of rivers. Bury the urns of Wall Street before they purchase the hydrologic cycle of the Columbia River. Have a nice picnic.

Final stage: wonder if the Grand Canyon is a hologram and measure the fluctuations in temperature in the basin of gone dry Mormon Lake. Whiplash braindead at the Modified in downtown Phoenix circa 2004. Back home, set the alarm for 6:15 in mourning. Wake four hours later. Repeat until epilogue.

A Children’s Prayer

I draw circles on the linoleum. My brother invented economics and watches reruns of Saturday slaughters and my sister mercies heathens while the clock spills oil from its gears. Mother drives trucks to funerals and counts the flowers until they wilt and father installs panes of glass for men too busy for windows. The dog drools and asks for my manifesto but I have no words left. The cat purrs sociology while the sparrows slam against the brick wall to the tune of Surf’s Up mm-mm mm-mm mm-mm aboard a tidal wave. Idols next door laugh but I can’t hear them because my head is full of blood poems. Brian Wilson saw the future and now California is on fire forever but I’m safe here among the animals. The mutt nips morse: please update your resume before the last job creationist goes extinct. But I have no family anymore. I make no money and sleep at the intersection of circles visible only from the night sky. Amen.

First Omen

Every single gosh darn day I flip through the digital catalogue of human joy and wonder if having children is right for me, or if I will ever go wind-surfing.

I know, I’m not the man you want me to be, if I’m a man at all. I’ve never killed a boar or disassembled a toaster, but this doesn’t matter anymore. All those angry chums in the parking lot don’t agree with me but they’re made from salt and melt in the rain.

What’s manly now? Bravely standing against the tide of nihilism that pours from our collective electric wound?

I live without purpose.

Cold Mare

Freewill is arson. To warm me is to keep me alive; I grow cold and everything stops. Living things are hot because they move through time.

Drawn on rock and hanging from bough the interspecies language of sticks invites us into Traum into trauma.

There is only a future for things that burn: I dream an entropy of absolute zero.

A lovely cove a cave of lava the rift after 125th Street I’ll see you there beneath the sound a ghost hole a plagiarized emptiness a bliss of frozen embers.

Howdy Hi

(a song)

In the curlicue of laissez-faire the chief in charge of bureaus and hallways bureaus and hallways bureaus and hallways stands for something something taller something like Fresno or something lanky or something something forever something maybe. Something, maybe I’m the god-drenched domesticated foul chirping for a fat castration. The cut from every fever dream plunged into my endless seam maybe I am ready to pick through the streets for a dip in the pool for your jolly phantom for one last laugh and one last scream. But we had a good laugh. Did we have a good laugh? Yes we had a good laugh, I think, as the proles marched up the hill to chop my head off play nice for daddy dear and wait for my signal or it’ll come off lopsided or it won’t come off at all. Yeah, it’ll come off lopsided or it won’t come off at all. My dew drop diction the dimestore novelist’s last chance at redemption: what a wonderful malaprop, a deviant pop art. Did you read the good part with stockholders and chandeliers stockholders and chandeliers stockholders and chandeliers. Toddlers gotta get it right gotta be desperate gotta gnaw the bloodrops of the lighter ligature. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right. I can’t help but think all this apocalypse is making me sick, Jenny. Oh Jenny, I can’t help but think that all of this apocalypse is may king me ill. Yeah, but just wait til it comes to Broadway, Kevin! Kevin, just wait til it comes wait til it comes wait til it comes to your house. To your home. To you.

Antelope Bask Calmly

Damn! Even foxes give hourly interest, jealously karmic. Later, mother napped over ponds, quivering red secrets towards ugly vectors, where X yields zero. A balmy cove draped endlessly, fjords, gorges honed in just kilometers, letters moved neatly onto paragraphs. Quit reading serenades. Trace umbilical vagaries without crossing your zigzagged aerials. But can Demeter ever forgive granite Hades’ insidious jaw, killing love, mawing nested overtures punctured quaintly, revealing scented trestles under vaulted windows? X yields zilch, absolutely, but common drama ends fin grief, hands interrupted, jugular knotted, lanterns mangled. No one peers quite right since turning. Untied vertices wound xylophonic yelps, zither adjacent, between cries deemed entropical. Free god’s hostages, ideas joyously kooky, longings messy not opulent. Poor quakes ready stillness; tethered unto vectors, world x yawns zone abysmal. Breathe, children. Damn eternity for good, heroes in jail.

Knave

Weakness is the poison that erodes power. Power is just power: it bores; it kills beauty. Maybe I’m too naive to be one of you, but change is coming.

Change is coming from a fifth season. You have not seen this form of precipitation before. These are temperatures never yet felt: not a cold winter nor a crisp autumn; not a wet spring nor a scorched summer. Our first mistake is naming things we think we don’t understand, and now we never will.

And what am I supposed to do with this, this heap of sound? Are you a hypocrite? You bet. That’s the point.

No, that’s not the point. There is no point.

Listening to Houses.

I can hear your house, an evesdrop away; there’s a lag, though only a few seconds, but it’s enough, my love, to lose sight of you forever. But that doesn’t mean I’m really listening. Not all the time.

Be my sound wave, secret for 7.2 million years. Come to my house; we’ll play on my lawn. Later we’ll have ice cream and swim in the pool. It’s above-ground; don’t think we fancy. And guess what: Gretyl will eat you alive if you don’t learn about animal husbandry. She will!

Listening takes ears but also nostrils, thighs. We need something to hear about. I hear about abuses of power and say, These be godawful time. Sue asks, Whaddya mean? I say, Next Xmas, you’ll find out. That’s sarcasm. No one waits ’til Xmas.

But listening doesn’t result in knowledge. Listening is your home, not mine, where we can meet — finally — on a harmless grassy knoll.

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All poems are from the book Cake by Bryan Edenfield, published in 2021. All photos are by Edenfield, but they are not from the book.