Emergency Chocolate Cake
It’s the cake we bake
in wartime, without
eggs or milk, without
flour or chocolate.
We bake it
without ovens or
pans. It’s hard
to imagine
sitting around
the bombed-out
kitchen table,
eating it without
hands, without
a mouth, without
saving the recipe
for some knucklehead
in peacetime, in
uniform, gung-
ho to reenact
everything we
went without.
Andrea Cohen’s most recent collection of poems, Nightshade, was published last year; a new collection, Everything, will be out in 2021. Cohen’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Read poetry by Andrea Cohen previously appearing in Terrain.org: four poems, seven poems, and four poems.
Header photo by Zsolt Biczo, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Andrea Cohen by Adrianne Mathiowetz.
