My mother beets borgs trying to fit in at the robot factory.

Magenta vegetable blood trickles down metal panes.

My mother beats me in the egg case gulag.

She has to teach me a lesson about

how a part of us is sasquatch—

hairy, scary, unintelligible.

Even though I try to hide it from her. Like juggling raw eggs,

 

my mother beats me into the white cake batter.

My hideous clot of yellow yolk

sneaks its way in.  I’m ruined again.

She scrapes the cracked shells down the sinkhole.

 

Those fake moustaches don’t help the robots

look any more human-like. Their rusty metal fingers stir

the red velvet, the wrong cake mix.

Even though those Styrofoam cartons peep, ‘Mama, mama, mama’,

she extracts the double yolks before they can grow

into two-faced conjoined twins.  Another unacceptable brood

to hard boil, to drown in beet juice, to separate

from the glass cake plate’s crystalline face.