Baking Cake on Dec. 27
Dear Kyra,
Here you are in the scent of chocolate beet cake
that lingers in the kitchen hours after the cake is done—
as if the world conspires to prove how something
we can’t see or touch can still be so present.
I remember the first time you made the recipe for us—
how outrageous it seemed to add roasted beets to a cake.
Now it’s our favorite, dark and rich with deep pink frosting.
Every time we make it, we think of you. Like tonight.
As Vivian and I bake a birthday cake for Timothée Chalamet,
we celebrate his life even as we mourn your death.
Isn’t it always all of it all at once? For days,
I’ve been lighting candles for you in the windows,
letting time blow them out. Tonight, I trace
your handwritten notes on the recipe with my fingertips—
like using less sugar and subbing coconut oil for butter,
plus suggestions for how to make the frosting more fancy.
I feel as if you’ve left handwritten notes in my heart—
like bake more cakes, substitute kindness for annoyance,
plus suggestions for how to make music in the hardest times.
I don’t know how it works, but if you can make a wish,
these candles are for you. I will keep lighting them.
It’s dark, my dear, and your life is still so bright.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Dear friends,
My beloved friend Kyra Kopestonsky died on Dec. 23, 2025, at 5:25 p.m. of complications due to breast cancer. She was one of the most kind, generous, loving, peaceful, humble, creative humans I know. In dozens of my books, she’s left me little love notes over the years. She would make our family certificates for sweet and silly things, and we have them hanging on the wall. She made us strange and lovely new foods–like chocolate beet cake–and would leave them labeled in our fridge. She was a talented musician who used to play piano for a living, then left that work to be more of a vagabond, traveling with her cello and playing roadside and on mountainsides. She accompanied me on so many trips to play cello with me as I performed poetry, and for many years she was the host of the “Poetry Drop Box” beside the highway–a way for people to exchange poems. She would play cello on top of people as a way to heal them, and for my birthday, she would always play me a Russian death song–haunting and minor and slow. Being Kyra’s friend is one of the greatest gifts of my life. May we all carry a bit of Kyra’s love light and shine it forward into the world.
Below are links to other poems about her–and here is a link to her official obituary.
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2020/02/26/olfactory/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2020/01/18/how-to-slice-open-an-avocado/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2017/11/03/on-my-birthday-a-death-song/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2025/01/29/stage-4/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2024/09/14/before-turning-toward-light-again/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2019/02/05/one-friendship/
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2025/12/24/lit/