The townspeople paste wax apples on the trees,
glow shyly out their windows as the Dictator
struts past the monument of his father strutting
past nothing at all. Yesterday, the Dictator dressed
the Butcher’s boy in the uniform of his own son.
Today, at the orders of the Dictator, guards shot the boy.

In the town of his childhood, the Curator is a tourist.
He touches his mother with the language
with which he does not touch his work.
In the painting, bored bored Eve chomps on an apple.
In the tongue of his work, he acquires her.

At the banquet: pigs choked with apples,
music wrung from the townspeople’s anguish.
The meat in the soup is human meat.
The Dictator’s ring is made of gold
yanked from the teeth of corpses.

The Censor bloats with what he knows.
His sons bloom in neat rows.
An orchard grows inside his wife.
He prunes her on Sundays.

Under the earth, the Butcher’s boy, laughing,
eats an apple. The core rises, light with rot.
The Dictator admires the fruit of his land.