cake

a poem about mothers; a poem about holding abundance

Cake —
holder of opulence soft and gooey
within a sturdy frame.

My mother — knows how to aim
at the day when our eyes get dewy
and wiser with one year of age;
makes each one of us a cake
accordingly to our sweet tooth.

It brings back in her her youth, 
when she takes over the kitchen to bake 
and a glass of wine ends up on stage.
Her cheeks still flush the same way
they used to when she was a maiden.

Curiosity always tries to fade in 
as it must do, on one’s birthday, 
and I ask her about that one time 
they slit her equal parts 
to get me out of her gut.

What did she feel, and exactly what 
does one think when one has two hearts 
and one body trying to make them rhyme? 
Was the cut sideways
or from the bottom up?

She says, I thought you’d fit in a cup, 
though I couldn’t see well through the haze 
of finally having you in my embrace, 
and my legs I couldn’t feel, 
I couldn’t feel anything at all.

I only felt in my lap a warm ball, 
how part of me had started to heal
and i could finally give myself grace 
because — you, that I could feel, at last. 
As she talks, I take a sip.

I cannot start to imagine my own hip 
under such a weight, my body so vast,
stretching in all direction to create space 
and then once more stretched violently 
for a something with a future undefined.

Though my mother’s youth declined 
I still see the maiden in her, silently
peeking through her painted lips, a trace
of not what’s lost, but what can never be lost 
despite making us cake, despite knowing us to perfection. 

Every piece of it, its every section 
came to my mother with a crucial cost 
yet into us she keeps on pouring 
and that’s how cake into opulence grows,
that’s how cake love thick and gooey becomes.

I will eat its very last crumbs,
I’ll bring my mother back her hair bows.

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