Blue and White by Michael Johnson

You decided cake pops were easier
than baking a whole cake,
which turned out to be a lie
somewhere around the second bowl
and the first ruined batch.

Vanilla on one side of the counter,
chocolate on the other,
crumbled cake pressed between our palms
until it became something
close enough to round.

You had bought blue and white icing
for your mother,
the colors of her old high school,
and that mattered enough
for us to get it right.

I remember you leaning over the counter,
trying to make the blue behave,
while I held one crooked little cake pop
by its stick and insisted mine looked fine.

It did not.

You laughed,
and I ate the evidence.

By the end, there was icing
on the counter,
on our hands,
somehow in my hair,
and a tray full of
little blue and white disasters
that you were proud of anyway.

I don’t remember what your mother said
when she saw them.

I don’t remember whether
we cleaned the kitchen that night.

I remember vanilla.
I remember chocolate.
I remember blue and white
drying beneath the kitchen light.

At the time,
it was only a birthday.

I did not know
I was supposed to remember everything.

This poem was selected as the Winner of SITREP’s Fall 2026 Poetry Contest!