Communion Cake At seven minutes past midnight, fake tan still to do, I am making a cake for your Communion: blood orange and raspberry, swiss meringue buttercream. No radio to wake small sleepers: just the mixing bowl and me. I stir in that time I chipped my front tooth drinking wine from the bottle on a hurtling bus; the morning I markered on shared sheets, the apple of my anger skin-bursting and monstrous... you should get a taste of that; that night I collapsed in a chip shop, wearing ridiculous purple stilettos. The mother who tied your laces - see her there, stranger-circled on the dirty floor; divorced joys of morning cigarettes, kissing boys on other planets heart sky-sized and full, body music-wrapped - in they go, alongside that jump from a ten-foot wall in heels and a ballgown. Finally, the morning I rang in sick, first day in a new job, to stay in bed with your young father. In it leaps, just before the final stir-up. This thick batter of blunders and misreckonings, I spoon into tins. The oven hums readiness for transformation, separateness debunked in its warm belly. Beloved, it’s scary, but a liberation, too when we discover the woman in front walked mapless, through a trail of spilt milk. Michelle Dennehy
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