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Anne Sexton Bakes Cookies for her Daughter’s Local PTA
I dreamt last night I saw Anne baking cookies
for her daughter’s local PTA, dipping her hands in flour
like rabbit ears, fluttering the darling little angels
as they gagged on cigarette smoke
smeared against her apron’s ruined ghosts.
I watched her wield her rolling pin,
flatten dough smooth as hotel room bed-sheets,
ashes drop like fireflies from her Virginia Slims,
all the men in her life snuffed out, wings pulled off,
scrapped like the lines of her unfinished poems.
Her daughters, those little girl dresses she loved.
The moony shapes of their unbuttoned blouses,
rolling, rolling, rolling the ashes of herself into them
like bone meal, her liver, her one weakened kidney,
deli-thin, a shape she could swallow without tasting.
A hair, a severed nerve on her forehead,
flicked away as though it were a lover,
a mosquito hovering around a string of damp pearls,
sucking her dry for all the wrong reasons,
The timer: tick, tick, tick, and a glass of smart Chardonnay.
She waited for the first batch, the excited heat
to climb over her—Lowell, Maxine—who’d made her edible,
a petit-four, foie gras, the perfect meringue,
as she ground a handful of aspirin, dust the cookies
for her little girls, for their bruised hatchings.
Return to Volume 6.3
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