REVERSE EVALUATION > POETRY
Who the fuck used this bathroom before me?
I can admit
for every toilet bowl I’ve stood before, I’ve wiped the seat.
Only noticed the door handle was slick until after I let go.
Little
in the trash except a balled Kleenex blooming
and a folded pad, warm floral Playtex wrapping
like excitement or is it Always
like care or the consideration
of femininity:
Women must like flowers, right, what is your favorite flower
so I know which to purchase
to every girlfriend I’ve had.
Can I admit that
for each woman I’ve loved, I’ve wondered about their menstruation,
time
and precipice and duration and imagined
the folding over of oneself above the toilet, folding over
paper product
to the point the bodily vanishes?
AI admits “feminine hygiene products are marketed to emphasize
‘sanitary cleanliness,’ ‘invisibility,’ and overcoming
the ‘inconvenience’ of menstruation, often by exploiting insecurities
around bodily functions
like odor or leakage,”
that “moist” and “flow” carry in their arms multiple children
named
for the loudest voice,
for the brand logo whose shade
has its eyes.
Can we corrupt, then, the bathroom with our excretions,
let the sink wash splash the lip, dry itself into a face
in the right light
that turns on when the door opens with your movement?
This is for the environment. Choose I/II to flush. We’re talking water
volume
or pressure, not
what’s needed to prevent servers from overheating
or generate sufficient electricity. Dick-in-hand,
I admit, I’m imagining
the cross-sections of toilets in Lowe’s Home Depot Ace
Harbor Freight Fleet Farm Farm and Fleet that depict shit
and paper products with metaphors like pool balls,
Kohler’s opaque blocks
with style lines, American
Standard now
in heathery eggshell.
My last phone search wasn’t about that, I can admit that now,
but “palate vs palette” and misspelled.
It admits, AI,
I forgot about the wood meaning,
amazing,
to unrecall the past like that, the pallet jack of summer jobs,
the slide of a metal tongue beneath a rough-cut pine plank.
This is about abortion
of meaning from object, memory from the saw dust smell
in Menards, the name from the pun on my nuts,
liquid
on the public bathroom floor from source
or wonderment. Do you remember
the iPad launch, the jokes about sanitary napkins
then not?
Let it sink in.
Let’s think the sink as something others have spat or cummed
or cried or snotted
or thhh-ed or rinsed
or coughed or vomited
or bled or uhhhk-ed
or pussed or pissed
in and looked at
and then themselves disparagingly.
May I admit, here
my pride
when my dad just cut the plywood on the store floor that one time
in college after an employee said no,
they can’t do that here.
Imagine excretion all hot and corporate.
The sawdust pile was like that.
Daniel Altenburg is a Midwest-socialized, hometown-less Air Force brat. His writing often juxtaposes the mundane with the mythological in order to investigate the vulgarities of language. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and his work has appeared in Spork, BlazeVox, Yalobusha Review, Juked, Gigantic Sequins, elsewhere, and on his website www.lettersofwreck.com. He teaches high school English and lives with his wife and children in Tucson, Arizona.
Instagram: daniel.altenburg