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Wednesday, December 06, 2017

THE BAKER, THE CAKE, AND THE CLIENT

by Dorothy Baird


Image source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek


I bake cakes—
pound, fruit, layer, sheet—
for birthdays and tea breaks.
Wedding cakes, my greatest feat.

A merger of moist, delicate cake
with frostings and fillings of sweet.
Art and skill create a keepsake
with flowers and furbelows neat.

Oh! But wait!
two grooms will not eat my cake.
Neither a cupcake nor a pancake
will I make.

I have standards, you know.
My baking is conditional
on their being traditional,
then I’ll take their dough.


Dorothy Baird lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared on line and in print in TheNewVerse.News, Iodine, Kakalak, and other anthologies and journals, and in her book Indelible Ripples (Kelsey Books 2017).