How to Make a Banana Milkshake Get up while he’s still sleeping even though it’s not your apartment. Leave him with the sheet wrapped PG-like at his waist, white against his tan back, a mattress commercial. Put on his discarded T-shirt, lying in a rushed wad on the floor – this is the sexy thing to wear, hem hanging just below. Go quietly, soon enough the blender will wake him. On the counter, find the bananas he bought, knowing they’d be needed for something. Peel back the silent yellow skin, see its slippery whitewashed lining. Sneak the bite off the point, because you will anyway, the tender cone tip asks to be eaten. Pack vanilla ice cream into the chrome Waring blender he grew up with. Add milk, slice in banana, falling off the knife like quarters for the poor – it will be an all-white morning. Find straws in the cupboard next to the liquor, when you didn’t expect to but looked anyway. Drink your uncolored milkshakes in bed – still four white walls, a vacant site, a smear of red across it, lipstick graffiti. Be caught slurping through the straw at the end, just to be sure.
Middle Ground Not the pressed wet sand hard as tar-top pocked with tiny clam holes and jellyfish pucks or the feathery dry sand the sinking labor of simple steps through pebbles of driftwood char a history of bonfires but the in-between sand maybe the width of your length heels break the dark crust to warm yield of dry below mark of ocean’s furthest graze before its lunar outbound pull a distribution of twisted kelp and incomplete sand dollars the place you reach for my hand
Please Come Back
The mammogram wagon rolls into your office parking lot and takes up ten spaces. Every year a fancier version, bought with the donations garnered at silent auction. Inside, it’s just like an RV – bench seat of Herculon fabric, oak and brass trim, the way you might suddenly be on the road to Montana. You forever inhale the fumes of new carpet. The specialist has shiny cheeks and smells of newly folded linens. Her fingers prepare your breast to flatten in the crosshairs. Her touch, the glass plate, the air-conditioning whistling through cleavage – it’s all cold. She doesn’t stop you from viewing the x-ray on her thin monitor. The film is a Rorschach test – butterfly, two faces, a train wreck? A week later a pink envelope arrives saying your breasts are clear and beautiful, like a compliment from a lover. We are pleased to tell you and there are no signs in a cursive font. But this year they call instead. When you hear the nurse’s voice you think of how they’re just saving postage. A shape, a shadow, don’t worry.