Communion Cake Michelle Dennehy

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