“Cupcakes Are for Everyone” by Daniel Poitras
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Cupcakes Are for Everyone” by Daniel Poitras.
Cupcakes Are for Everyone
By Daniel Poitras
Bought these cupcakes one day, they were a Safeway special. They looked soft and fluffy at first glance,
peppered with hearts of red, white, and pink. I couldn’t help myself and went and bought them, cupcakes
that looked like they would crumble in your mouth and need to be handled with care. I can imagine the
baker layering thick pink, purple and white frosting onto bleached white cake.
I offered the first one to the cashier. She asked me “how’s it going, what are my plans today?” He eyes
are slipping past me, to the line that extends five hours more until they let her go home. She smiles with
the teeth she eats with, letting lines like “aren’t you the sweetest” and “I couldn’t possibly”, escape from
her jaws. There’s an artificial sweetness there. Thank you and come again have never sounded more
dangerous.
My Aunt Ethel sitting in the bingo hall. Stuck there with all the mothers and fathers and sisters, brothers
aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Locked in this combat, this vicious hope. Stamping at
the numbers, rising suicides, rising debt, court dates, blotting out those numbers. There’ll be only one
big winner. The rest of you will have to go back to your failures. A booming voice from the heavens call
out. Strike down with your fist. Heaven calls out. Strike with your fist. Only one will ascend. It isn’t you
tonight Aunty. Here, have one. It’s a diabetic dozen, the frosting will help you. Foot by foot, six of ‘em, it’s
a diabetic dozen.
I wish I kept the one I gave to this chick I’ve been eyeing up. She said my poetry was depressing,
disturbed – A thousand pardons. Had I the strength n’ means I would pluck the very sun from the
stillness of its blue canvas and draw inspiration upon each flicker smoke smoldering and massive
explosion flaring. I’d pull the simple, vibrant dreams of kids and paint the horizons. Whisper I love you to
the ear of all things that murmured and breathed. Tell the Creator he is no longer needed and right all
these wrongs myself. Smoke would only carry our thoughts to the nostrils of the ones we were
missing. Yes, yes, I would undo all the things done in cruelty and fear, no lessons to be learned,
Hallmark’s accounts would be as empty as their sympathies. As empty as the white bleached cake she
bit into. Rehearsed smiles and gratitude noises. Rehearsed similes and doggerel poetry. Everyone loves
cupcakes. The sweet cheap food fills us up, let them eat cake.
I saved one for my daughter since her birthday was yesterday. She smiled the way she sometimes does
tilting her head to one side. Then her bitch-whore mother said I should have at least called yesterday –
You would have remembered if you wasn’t always drunk. To hell with her. I should have spent more time
with my baby.
Left one with my late sister. I wish I had said something back then. I heard his bastard raspy whisper
every goddamn time. His slobbery breathing and grunts cut through the darkness, through my heart – be
a good girl and don’t tell your mom. She loved cupcakes, especially ones laced with rat poison.
The last one is for me. One cupcake to fight the chalky taste of pills, one candle to light my way, and one
prayer to let them know I’m coming.
There something about cupcakes: whether it’s manic cashiers, or old squabbling women waiting to die in
bingo halls, or cruel uptight cock teases, or precious girls who are daughters to castrating man-haters
and nobody fathers, or brave sisters who sit and cry at night, or bloated fuck-ups rotting away in
bathrooms, somehow cupcakes are for everyone.
Copyright © Daniel Poitras
Daniel Poitras is a half-breed poet from the Paul First Nation. Writing vicious Native poetry while residing in Beaver Hills House. He has been published in the Home and Away anthology (House of Blue Skies, 2009), The Malahat Review, Grain Magazine, featured reader in the Olive Reading series and included in the Edmonton Poetry Festival’s Poetry Moves on Transit program. Contributor to the Polyglot Magazine: issues niteh and Aniskoverbaration.
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