STILL LIFE WITH DICTATOR

Anyone can look at a bowl filled with plums.

Even the ones trampled beneath the hooves

of the general’s white horse—the peons,

 

the threshers, the nobodies. Food, the great

leveler. The nobodies must eat, even if

they resort to coffee grounds,

 

or sandwiches airlifted and dropped

into the jungle, teeming with maggots.

Food is food. Even the general must eat.

 

Even presidents, dictators. Hitler himself

would walk along the cliff’s edge from his

compound in Berchtesgaden to the round

 

teahouse in the trees. He’d settle himself

into the cushioned chair some nobody pulled

out for him, and into the nose positioned

 

over that cowcatcher mustache came

the scintillating fragrance of tea roses.

‘There must be fresh flowers!’ he’d barked

 

at the peons. As the steam from his tea

dampened his cowcatcher, his eyes lit

on the white bowl impassively holding

 

ten plums. He wanted to upend them, send

the white bowl spinning until it hit the curved

wall and broke into splinters the size of baby

 

teeth .‘Who cares?’ he wanted to say to the plums,

but they wouldn’t listen. Such an ordinary fruit;

he’d seen the nobodies wolfing them down

 

and spitting the pits in the air. Braying like donkeys,

like schoolboys. The plums mocked him

with their stillness. The sugar bowl mocked him,

 

the sugar spoon engraved with the fat head

of a thistle. Fruit sickened him, with its worms

and scars, its fermentation. Its plainness,

 

its roundness, its calm. It stared at him

like one of those nobodies who didn’t care

how many times it was whipped. One

 

of those who claimed to be beyond pain,

one with a glint of what the churches

would call holy light in their eyes. Plums,

 

taunting him until he grabbed one

and bit down and let the gold flesh

fill his mouth with its revolting sweetness.