Aunty Sandy’s Banana Bread by Jennifer Lagier (ONE GOOD MEMORY Series)

Aunty Sandy’s Banana Bread
by Jennifer Lagier

The excursion van
pulls off the pot-holed road
as we rattle toward Hana,
stops at a ramshackle bakery stand
near an outdoor farmer’s market.

Warm, tropical fragrance
soothes nerve-rattled tourists.
One by one, we pay tribute
to the goddess of banana bread,
hand over five-dollar bills,
receive precious plastic-wrapped bundles.

We know our carnal cravings,
invest in two, one of which
we pull apart and devour within thirty minutes,
reverently inhaling steamy, succulent chunks
of cake-like confection.

Around us, fellow passengers
can’t control sounds of mutual pleasure,
experience their own multiple culinary orgasms,
uninhibited ecstasy of taste bud explosions,
courtesy of Maui’s Aunt Sandy.

PHOTO: Aunty Sandy’s banana bread. Visit Aunty Sandy’s at auntysandys.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This poem captures the experience of a day on Maui just before the pandemic hit. We were part of a small group exploring the road to Hana and stopping at various colorful spots along the way. Aunty Sandy’s banana bread was an amazing epiphany!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Lagier has published 19 books, and her work has appeared in a variety of anthologies and literary magazines. She edits the Monterey Poetry Review and helps coordinate Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Second Sunday readings. Her recent collections include Meditations on Seascapes and Cypress (Blue Light Press), COVID Dissonance (CyberWit), and Camille Chronicles (FutureCycle Press). Visit her at jlagier.net and on Facebook.

PHOTO: The author in Maui, Hawaii.

Down on My Knees, poem by Ginger Andrews

DOWN ON MY KNEES
by Ginger Andrews

cleaning out my refrigerator
and thinking about writing a religious poem
that somehow combines feeling sorry for myself
with ordinary praise, when my nephew stumbles in for coffee
to wash down what looks like a hangover
and get rid of what he calls hot dog water breath.
I wasn’t going to bake the cake

now cooling on the counter, but I found a dozen eggs tipped
sideways in their carton behind a leftover Thanksgiving Jell-O dish.
There’s something therapeutic about baking a devil’s food cake,
whipping up that buttercream frosting,
knowing your sisters will drop by and say Lord yes
they’d love just a little piece.

Everybody suffers, wants to run away,
is broke after Christmas, stayed up too late
to make it to church Sunday morning. Everybody should

drink coffee with their nephews,
eat chocolate cake with their sisters, be thankful
and happy enough under a warm and unexpected January sun.
***
“Down on My Kneew” appears in Ginger Andrews‘ collection An Honest Answer (Story Line Press, 1999), available at Amazon.com.

A Boogie-Woogie Wedding Cake, story by Jesús Salvador Treviño

BOOGIE-WOOGIE WEDDING CAKE (Excerpt)

by  Jesús Salvador Treviño

A capricious breeze escaped from a small hole in the ground in Mrs. Romero’s front yard at precisely the place where more than a year before the sinkhole had erupted. The freakish wraith of wind rose from the vent and moved, snakelike, across the dichondra lawn and then began a slow ascent into the sky, traveling in a lazy spiral, like a hawk riding hot thermals, rising higher and higher, until the effervescent current was circiling high over the dilapidated wooden structure at 410 Calle Cuatro, which for forty-eight of her eighty-two years Mrs. Romero had called home.

 The breeze then suddenly plunged into a sharp dive, gathering speed and momentum as it descended, honing in on Mrs. Romero’s house like a precision arrow finding its bull’s eye. As the gust of wind reached the house, it found an opening in the kitchen window and burst through like a sprinter crossing the finish line.

Inside, the octogenarian was busy beating the special batter for the wedding cake she had committed to bake for Rudy Vargas and María López’s big wedding…With her back to the pastry cookbook that lay open to a recipe for “Golden Cream Wedding Cake,” she did not notice when the rascally draft swept over the cookbook, rustling its pages from page 231 to page 238, the recipe for “Three-Tier Chocolate Layer Cake…

***

“A Boogie-Woogie Wedding Cake” appears in Jesús Salvador Treviño’s collection The Skyscraper that Flew and Other Stories, available at Amazon.com)

Painting: “Lady” by Isblahblah, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris, poem by Helen Maria Williams

To Mrs K____, On Her Sending Me
an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris
by Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827)

What crowding thoughts around me wake,
What marvels in a Christmas-cake!
Ah say, what strange enchantment dwells
Enclosed within its odorous cells?
Is there no small magician bound
Encrusted in its snowy round?
For magic surely lurks in this,
A cake that tells of vanished bliss;
A cake that conjures up to view
The early scenes, when life was new;
When memory knew no sorrows past,
And hope believed in joys that last! —
Mysterious cake, whose folds contain
Life’s calendar of bliss and pain;
That speaks of friends for ever fled,
And wakes the tears I love to shed.
Oft shall I breathe her cherished name
From whose fair hand the offering came:
For she recalls the artless smile
Of nymphs that deck my native isle;
Of beauty that we love to trace,
Allied with tender, modest grace;
Of those who, while abroad they roam,
Retain each charm that gladdens home,
And whose dear friendships can impart
A Christmas banquet for the heart!

Finish what you start, quote by Dave Barry

“My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far today, I have finished 2 bags of M&M’s and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.”

DAVE BARRY

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Dave Barry‘s latest novel, Insane City – which the publisher has characterized as a “dark comic masterpiece” — is available at Amazon.com.

Cake Temptations, Quote by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.”

“That is true,” said Mma Potokwane sadly. “There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.” 

From In the Company of Cheerful Ladies by Alexander McCall Smith