#bathrooms
Because ankles are bound to get hot
In underwear collars why not
Raise up the stall door,
To ventilate more?
You’ll feel like you’re on board a yacht.
Dec 17, 2024
Dec 17, 2024 at 4:15 PM UTC
Sometimes, you gotta just sit
on the bathroom floor for a while.
Because,
that’s where you got ready for
sleepovers with the popular girls,
tattooed your finger when you were 15,
started to give up on the world,
and started to believe in it again.
Bumpy tiles beneath you,
leaving red imprints on your upper thighs,
they saw your manic impulses
and sluggish lows,
they saw your meltdowns
before dance class,
and moments of privatized shame
after knocking over a vase
at your own house party.
The walls have changed over the years,
the floors have been
tile and ceramic and hardwood,
but a bathroom is a bathroom -
your own personal echo chamber,
or a makeshift confessional,
whatever you may need.
Jan 16, 2020
Jan 16, 2020 at 4:10 PM UTC
The insomniatic somnolence coats me.
16kHz of sound running through my eardrums.
Empty words written on the walls of bathroom cubicals.
The lifes of people who come and go,
Snagged on the emtpy soap dispensers.
***** lino floors folded at the edges.
The rattling sounds of doors locking around me.
Plastic seats flipped down to carry weights,
Of the people who come to just sit down.
The rusted hinges on doors I can't seem to leave through.
This is both my prison and my safety.
Apr 29, 2018
Apr 29, 2018 at 9:51 PM UTC
It's 3:09am
I'm im the library
Desperately trying to write a research paper:
'LGBT Familes'
How fitting.
Caffeine courses through my veins
Coffee overloads my bladder
Bathroom.
I hate bathrooms.
When you have no gender
The simple act of relieving yourself becomes a chore
The heavy weight of that key decision
Chokes your lungs as you stand outside the doors
Two doors.
Men.
Women.
Not me.
The choice becomes simplified:
While I sometimes pass as a man
I often do not.
I can choose the men's bathroom
The consequence of which could end in physical violence
The same hate I explain through my essay.
The same fear that plagues my community.
The women's restroom is also an option
The consequences likely less dire than the former:
Heavy side eye and the potential of yelling.
A much safer choice.
Obviously.
Per usual, I walk into the women's room.
I take three strides inside.
Then I stop.
I've never used the men's room.
My fear of violent reactions has always won.
Yet at a time like this
How likely is it that someone is inside the men's room?
Now is my chance to face my fears.
Now I have a safe chance at peeing in peace.
In a bathroom potentially more suiting
Of my gender identity
So I turn around.
Let the door slam behind me.
Half a step into the men's room
The smell of rancid ***** hits my senses
Toilet paper liters the stalls
I have missed absolutely nothing in my years in the women's room
Women have nicer facilities
A significantly more advanced hand dryer
Cleanliness
Air freshener
Men do not have these luxuries
Now I question,
Do men not take as good of care of their bathrooms as women do?
Do the workers intentionally prioritize women's sanitation?
What causes this undeniable divide?
Is the messiness of the men's room a result of their conscious decisions?
Or simply a response to societal expectation?
Regardless,
I think I'll stick to the women's room
While I add bathrooms to my compilation
Of more discrete gender inequality
Oct 31, 2017
Oct 31, 2017 at 2:23 PM UTC
The poison is in all of us:
Half-smoked cigarettes lay on the side of grainy gravel paths,
crinkly Dollarama bags and glass beer bottles.
We relax on trees
leaning
backs against the braille texture of bark
that tries to speak to us in a language we don’t understand.
We lean back and raise our faces
towards the sunlight dancing between
the leaves of the canopy,
listening to the tires
whizzing against concrete,
but think it similar to the smacking of waves against stones;
lean back and savour the syrupy smell of maple trees
against our tongues,
thinking to ourselves
how grateful we are for nature
as we sit in a paradise of tall trees
their branches intertwined in a space
smaller than bathroom stalls;
lean back and breathe in exhaust
and cigarette smoke masked
behind a layer of sweet antiperspirants
and coconut-scented shampoos
as the wind whips hair against your face.
We take peaceful naps against the undeciphered braille,
but the poison is in all of us
and one day this paradise will become
nothing.
A bed of dirt
blanketed by prickly store-bought
strips of grass.
Jun 30, 2016
Jun 30, 2016 at 8:24 PM UTC
His face in the mirror
was not his face.
It was clean and seemed out of place
It's mouth too wide and its nose too small
It was not his, no, not at all.
But,
the more he looked, the more he stared,
he wondered why he should care;
it's just a face made out of skin,
a face does not even begin
to define a person, that much was certain,
so he left his face,
by the bathroom curtain.
Mar 4, 2016
Mar 4, 2016 at 10:47 AM UTC
I'm cool.
You're cool.
We're cool
It's cool.
We're cool.
It's cool.
I'm cool.
You're cool.
"Hey dude,
you alright in there?"
"Yea man,
it's cool."
Nov 14, 2015
Nov 14, 2015 at 2:21 AM UTC