A Dunk

When I held you beneath the surface
A few lonely bubbles floated up,
Wet, soggy, and limp – I removed you,
A cookie, made better, in my cup.

___________________________

The twist in this poem works better if I don’t give the ending away with a picture. Oh well.

There is definitely an art to dunking a cookie into your milk. If you hold it in too long, the structural integrity of the whole thing falls apart and you’ve got a soggy bits of mess just sitting at the bottom of the milk. Often the cookie bits don’t leave the bottom of your cup alongside the milk. Wasted cookie, dirtier dishes – not ideal. But you do have to leave the cookie in the drink for long enough to absorb *some* of the milk. It’s a hard balance.

One time I was staying at an Airbnb with my family. My vision impairment frequently means that when we travel, I stay behind with our luggage and read / write / watch movies / etc. while the vision able people in our group go and do the things that require vision to be fun. This was one of those times. I wanted to drink some non-black coffee and found myself without milk or sweetener. What I did have was a package of Oreo cookies. So I dissolved the cookie into my coffee and stirred it up. At first I thought I was a genius. My plan worked. The coffee was a bit sweeter and had just a hint of a mocha taste to it also. Then as I finished the drink, I encountered the chemical bits of the Oreo that God (probably) forbade man to consume. It was isolated from the rest of the tasty ingredients that mask its abominable presence within the cookie, and let’s just say it was an unpleasant-to-the-taste bit of gloop.

When I did it again, I stopped just short of finishing the drink and then I dumped the chemical gloop out into the sink. Modern problems require modern solutions.