This week’s poem, Kristin Davis’ “The Persistence of a Twinkie,” harkens back to a literally immortal childhood confection and the memories it holds. I love how deeply this poem plumbs both sense memory and recollections of ambivalent family bonds – and I also love the poem’s indelible final image.

Davis is former journalist and holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry has appeared in Passager, Think, What Rough Beast, the Bay to Ocean anthology and the Split this Rock blog. She lives part-time in Naples.

The Persistence of a Twinkie
By Kristin Davis

Tender as a lullaby, and loyal—the way he tidied
the rack of cellophaned cakes at the grocery,
bringing each pack down from the back row to fill
the spaces, fronting the rack for his employer.

Golden, almost-soggy sponge cake piped with immortal
white fluff, we’d get a bakery tray, twelve dozen
at Halloween, eat the extras icy from the freezer
in summer. Junk food were words unspoken

in our crumbling family. Twinkies, HoHos, cupcakes
with a waxy film of chocolate and a crowning
white swirl—we were to call them snack food.
Secretly I coveted my classmates’ foil-wrapped

Yodels at the lunch table, but I too was loyal,
aware of sustaining allegiances. Even when
he slurred his I love yous, crashed on the couch,
next day he’d be the one to hold my bicycle seat

till I could wobble away on my own, dab my knee
with Mercurochrome when I fell. The same year
Dad moved away, a chemistry teacher in Blue Hill
wondered how long a Twinkie would survive

without spoiling. A half-century has passed,
and that sweet, preservative-laced cake remains
intact under glass in a classroom. A dusty
experiment, enduring as memory.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Persistence of a Twinkie,” copyright 2024 by Kristin Davis, appears by permission of the author.