That year I cut my birthday cake with a machete, yellow cake
with chocolate icing, the same style my mother made from a mix.
In those days, long before the cake could cool, a plastic tub
of icing would pulse for me on the table, and my mother off
to other tasks, I would plunge the knife inside the living chocolate
to pull out a great blob, slathering a stroke on the cake’s surface.
Sullied, it all melted together, gloss into matte, soaking in,
an incredible wanton muddle, and I would dive into the moist,
hot center with a fork, the yellow cake, the chocolate,
now coagulated with my hunger. As an adult, I had to wait.
I had to wait patiently for a birthday to be constructed,
for the crumb to cool completely according to instruction, the icing
to be applied beautifully with an off-set spatula, smoothed
crisp and flat to receive every decoration. This, my cake, far too
precise, too mannered and well adjusted, too studied and enclosed,
too patterned and set for anything but a blunt sword to split it open.