The Paris Review - Fall 2016

Floor, and the windows were
Gingerbread
Finicky about neatness
She kept sweeping his feet from
The table
But something outside of the window
Got her attention
Holding hands, two blond children were coming down the road
And here he thought that the bones in the fireplace
Were animal bones
She pushed him through the back door
But he persuaded her to give him a piece
For the road
Next he was sitting in on a congressional
Hearing on whether to classify pancakes
As cake. A conservative senator warned of
A slippery slope. What next? he said,
Icing on biscuits?
His mother learned to make chocolate
Cake when working for
A German family
Charlayne, whose mother was German, said
That the Germans used real cocoa
And so he found himself as tiny as a baby fly
Inside of his mother’s favorite cake bowl
He was climbing
The ladle to reach the icing around the
Rim of the bowl
He and Sigmund Freud
He kept falling backward every time
He was about to reach the top
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