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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, will never tell in the afterlife. -38- ...

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