the gender groove

he's a manly man
collared shirt and tie
keeping it cool
pbr in hand
working the crowd
before his number

excusing himself,
he escapes to the
ladies' room, puts on
glitter and lashes
crimson flame lipstick
strawberry blonde wig
padded bra over
her white undershirt
tiny black dress, and
five inch stilettos

then she gets onstage
to lip-synch to the
song that saved her life
she's been practicing
the moves for weeks
in her room, and now
she can feel the cheers
through her whole body

after, she goes home
unhooks and unwraps
her binder, untapes
the soft packer from
her inner thigh
takes off the make-up
boxers on, tits out
she falls into bed
smiling

rules of the road

without looking both ways,
i start to cross the street.
a car turning right doesn’t stop;
i leap back, scared,
as my mother grabs my arm
and the driver leans on the horn.
“i had the right of way,”
i exclaim, indignant.

my mother is unimpressed by my knowledge
of the rules of the road,
maybe because she taught them to me.
“it’s like my mother always said,” she says,
“you can be right - ”
“or you can be dead right,” i finish.
she’s fond of her mother’s pithy sayings;
there are a hundred more that i could recite.
“but i was actually right,” i say,
smiling because I know she’s actually right,
as usual.

Going It Alone

For one week, Dusty didn’t leave her apartment. She lay on her folded-out sofa bed with the lights off and the TV on, occasionally getting up to eat. She paced the fourteen steps from one wall of her one-room apartment to the other, or sat staring out of her tiny window into the parking lot below. On Sunday she showered, put on clean clothes, and went to church. This was her vacation.

On Monday, Dusty went back to work. She walked there, like she walked everywhere. The ground was icy, but it was better than the forced proximity to strangers on the bus. At the factory, she avoided her coworkers’ eyes; it wasn’t hard to do. She had been working there for sixteen years. The boss who had hired her had long since moved on, and she wasn’t sure if anyone else there actually knew her name.

Over the course of the day, the other workers made plans to go out for drinks when they got off at six. They went out of their way to invite the new girl, a forty-something with bad skin and a horsey laugh; she talked with the other employees as if she had always been there. No one ever thought to invite Dusty to these get-togethers. Their eyes slid right past her. She told herself she didn’t care.

If her life was different, maybe her coworkers would be happy to see her. They might crowd around her, wanting to catch up on the last week, asking how her vacation had been. As it stood, she was glad they didn’t ask; the answer made her want to cry.

The Spirit of Why Not Kill Each Other

It started with a prank, a harmless prank. A sociology major got tired of her chemical engineering roommate talking about how easy the Arts students had it. She gagged him and tied him up in the back of an SJU classroom for the duration of a modern Canadian literature class, a God and Philosophy class, and an Honours Seminar in Educational Psychology. Six hours later, she let him go. He stumbled out, disoriented and barely able to walk, unfamiliar with that side of campus. Finally he found his way across the pond to refuge at an EngSoc meeting. “There was discussion,” he babbled in horror. “There was analysis.”

“Those bastards,” said the president. “We’ll get them for this.”

The next day, a virus sent through UW-ACE crashed most Arts students’ computers, as well as those in every Arts building on campus. When the computers finally turned on again, the screens would only show a picture of The Tool.

A FedS Arts Council member gave an interview to Imprint about how illiterate engineers and mathies worked out their insecurities by making fun of the clearly superior arts students. “Maybe if they were able to construct a complete sentence instead of communicating through grunts and farts, they wouldn’t feel the need to resort to violence,” he said.

He was found dead the following morning, hung by a pink tie in the middle of the SLC.