Birthday Cakes on the Web

Birthday Cakes on the Web

Superheroes from Ecuador, anime from Tokyo,
Pink blossoms for the can’t-get-enough-pink battalions

Chocolate-lacerated, frosting-entombed
Spun-sugar-Hello-Kitty statuette-bedecked

All shoved together cheek-to-bowl
in joyous thumbnails on the Web

High-brow: sifted cake flour.
Low-brow: Oreos and Cool-Whip.

Everyone uploading theirs like so many minor saints.
My poor browser can’t take it all in

at first loading rows of question marks
where cakes are supposed to be.

That year my four-year-old so loved the Concorde
that I tinted frosting blue, dolloped fluff for clouds

with a ruffle of grey off to one side and zagged by lightning
because next to airplanes he liked destruction best.

Nose tapered like a mantis, high-backed wings
all rolled from fondant, piped with black icing

belly in the clouds as it zoomed
from Paris to New York.

My cake their cakes our cakes
Cake upon cake photographed whole, then partitioned

once the breath of life snuffs the candles.
One year later this particular child persists.

The celebrants impale with forks,
suck on lemonade, then push back.

Thank you for these unrecorded plates
smeared with wreckage and collapse.