No More Cake Here

“No More Cake Here” contains eight stanzas of varying length. It includes sixty-four lines in unrhymed free verse, meaning there is no formal pattern of rhyme or meter. Poetic choices include the long line, or lines in excess of eight or so syllables. Where the line is short, the image or meaning is delivered simply and declaratively: “When my brother died” (Line 1); and “she missed the whole party” (Line 17); and “a magician of sorts” (Line 44).

The stanzas—Italian for room—move the reader through the poem as one would move through the rooms and spaces of a crowded house in the midst of a party, or through a house in a dream. The mother and father blow up balloons in what could be the living room; the siblings shred old clothes, throwing the “confetti” (Line 20) into the air in what could be the backyard. The kitchen is packed with almost one hundred people, impossible but also authentic to the experience of being in the kitchen at a big party.

Hungry dogs and unwanted visitors are either shut out of the house and its rooms or chased away.