We Might Have to Bake a Cake from Scratch

By: Ellen Skilton

and start again from the beginning —

this old cake from the back of the freezer

has a rancid aftertaste, first made

in a pre-reconstruction oven.

I used to think the answer was

finding better ingredients for the icing,

but it’s a whole new cake we need

with abolitionist-ground flour, reparations folded in

a new genesis, a reckoning, a from-scratch remake.

Those cakes in the windows of bakeries

made of cardboard, glitter, and glue

are make-believe monuments to falsetto ideals,

dusty mouse droppings litter their insides,

require breaking or burning in a dumpster fire.

It hurts too much, everyone living

inside a towering paper cake behind glass,

layers of caustic Caucasia baked into the crumb.

I am learning slowly to listen with humble ears,

to slice through the layers, break down, recreate.

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Ellen Skilton is a professor of education whose creative writing has appeared in The Dewdrop, Cathexis Northwest Press, Quartet, The Scapegoat Review, Dissident Voice, Philadelphia Stories, Red Eft Review and The Dillydoun Review. In addition to being a poet, she is an educational anthropologist, an applied linguist and a Fringe Fest performer. She has an MFA in Creative Writing at Arcadia University and lives in Philadelphia.