she got a new apartment
and changed jobs.
at work
she finds various ways
of covering her feminine parts.
she cuts her hair real short.
and that tightly bound corset-
a definite article.
but it’s complicated
at home,
she turns off the lights
and soaks in the tub.
the foreskin especially
made her uneasy.
when she told him
why she could not have children,
he found another womb.
the plane ticket she found
in his coat one day was dated
for next morning.
she went to her sisters’,
curled into a ball
and cried for days.
when she returned,
she got on her knees
and started putting him
into unmarked boxes.
books, notes,
records, clothes.
her dictionary was resting
on his desk, the pencil
wedged in awkwardly.
it would seem there are
two words for day in French,
the masculine le jour,
and the feminine la journée.
he thought this was interesting.
the box on usage
is highlighted heavily.
likewise, two words for year.
a year is a good way
to cover less distance
in more time,
says an entry in a journal.
suddenly, she recalls that once
she left the windows open
and sometime in the night,
it snowed into all the rooms.
seasons are surprising like that.
anglo-saxons counted their years in winters.
supposedly, modern english is neuter,
but that’s not entirely true.
we still think of winter as masculine,
‘old man winter’ further having counterparts
in other cultures.
admittedly, this gender is prescriptive
but it is, in fact, gender:
as they stumbled towards the car
through frequent storms,
he would curse fervently under his breath.
here, notice that ‘winter is a bastard’
sounds oddly ungrammatical.
‘winter is a real bitch,’
sounded just fine
so, gender and grammatical gender
are not the same, but you can’t know,
until some rule has been violated.
“you don’t seem yourself,” he says one day.
she nods in agreement
and violates élision.
in order to wrap my mind around her,
i like to pretend
she comes from a small family
of hermaphrodites.
it explains this uncertain feeling-
like an identity crisis
between grammatical gender
and actual gender.
what is a resolution
to a true crisis?
well, let’s see.
amour became masculine.
except in the plural,
where it still triggers
feminine agreement on the adjective:
ô des amours passées, comme
dispersent elles.
fourmie eventually settled
on the feminine gender
with the masculine form.
Third Place ~ Hart House Poetry Contest