Second Coming No. 478 — May 12, 2026
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
Mary Ellen Talley
Yeats’s Second Coming Kitchen Golden Shovel
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
—W.B. Yeats
I am drawn to good recipes and fine things
even when my life seems one prat fall
after another. I bake each cinnamon pull-apart
and lick buttery goo from my lips while the
chefs of common sense say to savor the centre
and celebrate all the ways food cannot
choke me. I suck the sweet from fingers as I hold
dear the desire for a communal breakfast, a mere
repast to survive the East Wing chef’s anarchy.
Because he cooks with raw milk and rancid flour, he is
known to inflict his depraved indifference loosed
unleashed at assorted global state dinners, and surely upon
our own sustenance—even as we rally to procure the
ingredients needed to nourish our malnourished world.
Mary Ellen Talley is the author of the chapbooks Infusion (Red Wolf Editions, 2024), Taking Leave (Kelsay Books, 2024), and Postcards from the Lilac City (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in CIRQUE, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Seattle Star, Trampoline, Origami Poems Project, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies. Talley, a retired school-based speech-language pathologist, lives in Seattle.
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