We served the cake in question at my late grandmother Bernadette’s 90th birthday. It looked like the platonic ideal of birthday cake, and it was very delicious. It was a joyful day. That weekend I’d learned that Bernadette was ill, and my time with her was shortening. When I wrote this poem, I was wrestling with that knowledge. Our reluctance to “ruin” the cake became a prism through which to see my grief and fear.

Anne Menasché grew up in New York’s Hudson Valley. She studied literature at the University of Virginia and now lives in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Town Creek Poetry and Frontier Poetry. She occasionally writes about daily life (and recipes) at poemathome.substack.com.