After the Party

Sugar dries on paper plates. The cake’s decimated and barely touched. What to do with the balloons? A few float listlessly, unattached, still bearing like bandages the tape that bore them to the wall. They’ve gone dull, rubber tips darkening to a bottle’s pinch. It’s too late, or too early. There are too many on the floor, stirred up as I stir. In the end, I cut them, urge a blade into the inch between knot and blossom. Slow deflation. It reveals what they are: sacs of plastic, stale with air. I’ve seen this before, in the newspaper picture of Nefertiti, bound in the antechamber of a tomb, cast out of favor, her body, barely wrapped. How they know her: by the queenly jaw, age of limbs and teeth. Also, by the broken mouth, smashed by priests so she cannot eat, cannot breathe in the afterlife.