No More Cake Here

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2012

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“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. The speaker descends to the basement in another stanza, hauling up old cookware they transform to party noisemakers. The stanzas of this poem create a domestic dream space reflective of the rooms a family inhabits.

Metaphor

The poem takes metaphor and literalizes it, or makes it real. In this case, the speaker’s relief at the prospect of their brother’s death becomes a literal celebration. It reflects the end of a cycle and pain and suffering.

Within this larger metaphor are smaller ones. The firetruck may symbolize catastrophe in remission—there is no fire to put out, as the brother has died. The truck is free to be a symbol of fun, a vehicle of amusement instead of emergency assistance. The balloons are a metaphor for letting go of trauma, the weight of tending to the drug-fueled disasters of a loved one. Throughout the poem, the almost manic attempts at festivity feel askew in the way a dream feels both real and unreal. Tension exists between the desire for the party and the enactment of it. When the brother appears at the end—alive—he calls the party out for what it is—an empty celebration, a non-event.

Enjambment

Enjambment is the poetic technique of continuing a phrase from one line, or from one stanza, to the next. The device creates opportunities for multiple meanings as well as for musicality in language. While Diaz ends many of her lines with periods, or end-stops, she enjambs others. The practice allows the reader to consider the weight and import of one line before moving onto the next, even if, syntactically, the phrase is still in progress. An example occurs at the very beginning of the poem:

When my brother died

I worried there wasn’t enough time (Lines 1-2)

There is no punctuation to alert the reader to the end of a phrase, but at this point, the tone is serious and expresses anxiety. There is the death of a brother, a concern about time. While the next three lines don’t derail the tone, they shift it:

to deliver the one hundred invitations

I’d scribbled while on the phone to the mortuary:

Because of the short notice no need to RSVP (Lines 3-5)

Here the anxiety around time shifts to an external, rather than an intimately emotional, concern. The first syntactical phrase spans five lines, bringing the reader into new territory with each line. The next two lines end in full-stops, before the last enjambed line of the stanza sets up the premise for the rest of the poem: “They did agree to drive by the house once / with the lights on—It was a party after all” (Lines 8-9).

Another example of enjambment that allows for nuanced meaning occurs on line fifteen: “Mom blew up / so many that she fell asleep” (Lines 15-16). While the reader understands that the mother has been given the task of blowing up balloons, this phrase—“Mom blew up” (line 15)—suggests, too, that the situation is volatile, and that the mother is vulnerable.