Love is a pink cake

By: Hope Fischbach

after Andy Warhol’s “Love is a Pink Cake”

Pittsburgh, PA

It is the first day of autumn, September breathing

into his skin and my prism fingers curled

in denim and disquiet.

Twilight snakes through steel frames, our hollow bones; I

want to lean

into him, stiffened spine to the cold grey lines,

the rust, the factory noise.

Gaze at the cross-armed sky as she

holds forth a downpour sure to come;

fluorescent office windows, eye

of the iron

beast, the grimed corners

of skyscrapers.

The lines of his face a pencilled map,

a wax-paper laugh, unknown yet

familiar strangers, we foxtrot by number

inside museum walls.

Andy would have eaten up the scene, painted us

a pink cake. I

would have said

I’m on a diet, brushing the icing from my lips. 

The cigarettes and dizziness— I

have had nothing

to drink, only soda

washing down the unsaid words.

Defenseless night guards, we disarm

ourselves. In the curve

of his collarbone I

whisper willow songs

—a waltz of ghosts.

We are sidewalks crashing into red lights,

vectors meeting in cosmic accident, sharp breath

like shattered windows,

mouths meeting like charged

ions, thunder, my prism fingers curled

around ribs, sparkling water

under smoke and rust.

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Hope Fischbach teaches by day and writes by night in the fine city of Knoxville, Tennessee. She holds a BA in English and Spanish from Lee University, and her work has appeared in Grist, Southern Indiana Review, Cleaver Magazine, and others.