The Gender Binary and the Space Race

By Asher Stein

 Though a bedpoem’s always hindered  let me reveal you a deconstruction  unfit for textbooks 

 unfit for school 

 unfit for hymns at the 

 public swimming pool  Tie ourselves up real nice 

 give final blessings 

 to the queen 

 and HIP HOP through my portal 

 where the ice melts 

 into cream: 

I 

HARK: the obligatory Marble which cannot  lose its spin: 

 Inside sleeps magma, both 

 rock and blood 

 immaculately ready to rumble....  and maybe, with great violence, ERUPT! But more, all this plasma threatens to pull  itself free, and all Blue Marble’s glass  and color along with it, a  shimmering rainbow string 

 disco virus 

 wanna suck on all 

 the tasty jawbreakers in the universe!  So said some particularly creative polyps now  obsidianed 

 like all the rest ‘fore they 

 even got another taste. 

 Outta its depth; magma can  only stay hot at home. 

II 

 Look at those cells! 

 They evoke colonies of metal bugs  doing their bidding: simpler, 

 easier to repair, but short-lived.  So it goes; complexity begets resilience!  And pain, obviously. 

 Lo, adore their two dominant forms  a: Shouldered and Baggaged

 b: Packaged and Received 

and our two Pure Types 

 1: Cum and Peruse 

 2: Strut and Confuse 

 and yet..... 

 both shower alone; 

 every identical, meticulous,  mindless motion 

 connect them through space  They drive the same, dream the same,  extort the same, teem the same;  But each eye is tainted 

 and neither sees before them  just another funny ape