16 pages • 32 minutes read
Natalie DiazNo More Cake Here
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Party
“It was a party after all” (Line 9), says the speaker of “No More Cake Here.” Had the reader not been informed on the first line that the speaker’s brother was dead, it might be a birthday party, complete with “free rides on the [fire]truck” (Line 7), balloons, clowns, a magician, live music, and a piñata. Of course, there is cake, the ultimate celebration food. The speaker even provides presents by giftwrapping the technology their brother dismantled and rebuilt while under the influence of meth.
The party marks a milestone and significant development. In this case, it celebrates the end of suffering, for both the brother and his family members. The brother is remembered as his best self, as a lover of chocolate cake. Many people attend. The only entities turned away are the “[t]wo mutants” (Line 45) who come looking for the brother’s cookware, and the hungry “stray dogs” (Line 30), none of whom are in keeping with the festive premise. Instead, they are reminders of the persistent hardships of life, and the ways in which people—even family—can become so “mutant” as to appear only “almost human” (Line 46).
Balloons
The red balloons in “No More Cake Here” are not only red, but “scarlet” (Line 14); they are “a fistful of red grins” (Line 23). The color suggests shame like in The Scarlet Letter, where Hester Prynne was forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” as a punishment for adultery. The color suggests violence; it invokes the kind of fear people with a fear of clowns might feel when they see a lurid red clown mouth. The balloons of this poem float, but do not disappear. Instead, they “zigzagged along the ceiling” (Line 14). They haunt, they lurk.
The speaker “put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons” (Line 10). The parents are to fill the balloons with memories of all the troubles the brother’s addiction brought in terms of “midnight phone calls,” / fistfights, and ER visits” (Lines 12-13). The red of these balloons is the color of blood, and family is blood. The speaker’s mother has poured so much of her life’s breath into these balloons, she can no longer stay awake, and will take no pleasure from the party. In fact, the process of blowing the past into these vessels is so depleting that she will remain unconscious for a decade.
The Cake
The speaker’s brother is embodied in the poem as his “favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting)” (Line 27). The sweetness of the cake celebrates the sweetness of the troubled brother, and is intended to leave a sweet taste after so much bitterness. Each invitee and family member has had a finger in the batter, in the making of the cake, and each invitee gets a slice. Some people (and dogs) are denied cake. They neither contribute to the sweetness nor may they partake of it.
The mother is asleep, and cannot eat hers, so the speaker saves a piece for her for later. It is a dream-cake, singular yet enough to feed a sizable crowd. It is brown, covered (perhaps smothered) in white.
At the end of the poem, the reader discovers it is not real, nor is any of the party. The brother wants to know “who baked the cake” (Line 58), as the person responsible is also responsible for initiating a celebration of his death—for wanting his death. The cake cannot exist, the sweetness of relief cannot be tasted, without the relief itself, which, in this case, is the death of the addicted brother.
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By Natalie Diaz
