Second Coming No. 113 — May 12, 2025
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House and his regime
Stephanie DuPont
As American as Apple Pie
It reminded me of what I grew up eating.
The recipe sailed so easily out of his mouth:
and landed on the Thanksgiving table:
“They should not be
in this country.”
I started to prepare
ingredients:
I got out the sugar and brandy.|
When he tried to hand me
more spice,
I told him: “It was immigrants
who helped shape the modern apple pie.”
“Apples
themselves are not native to North America;
European settlers introduced them.”
“And he is
as American
as apple pie.”
That is when it became heated!
The oven was ready to bake.
By this time, we ran out of sugar.
“Maple syrup,” I said.
“Native Americans
were the first
to eat it
and turn sap into sweetness.”
He said, “That one immigrant murdered a woman.”
He said, “Immigrants are rotten.”
And that is when I stopped speaking
in metaphors.
I said, “Inhumanity was born
inside this kitchen.”
My skin burned like the sun:
Cinnamon flowed through the room,
as he lit his White House on fire
to get rid of the spice.
He said it smelled like home again.
I said,
so did the fire.
Stephanie DuPont‘s work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Snakeskin, Reach Poetry, Cerasus Poetry, The Dawntreader, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Road Trips: Poets Respond to Travel on Life’s Highways and Byways (Highland Park Poetry Press, 2024). Originally from Miami, DuPont is now based in Sugar Hill, Georgia.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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Excellent poem. Love the extended metaphor and how it can be read as both a person and father at a family dinner and a citizen and and occupant of the White House.
In times where we are seeing nationalism projected as tradition, and waves of propaganda that pivot around rewriting history to project a faux 'pure' American identity, this poem is a well-timed, artful depiction of how racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric are contrary to the building blocks of what made USA the country that it is/was.
The extended metaphor of baking, and how each ingredient is pivotal to making the apple pie, is a powerful means of driving home the message of how important diversity is, and how the sum of diverse parts can only be conducive to making a greater whole.