At the Walmart Garden Center

Kara Dorris

Oh, Patriarchy, you dicknozzle, stop assigning all the women to work in the Garden Center. You think we are nothing but fruit & flower. That we have nothing better to do than compete with each other. Like it matters who can smother the most poppies. Or who can invent the dirtiest, raunchiest floral names. Or who has the sexiest voice over the PA. Please. It’s busy work to distract us from unionizing. But you can’t stop the beat. Mary & Medusa have become best friends & they gang up on frienemy Eve who won’t acknowledge her sexist existence. But that is a narrative for another time. The M&Ms keep sending Eve baskets of apples, an application for the produce section, apple tree seeds disguised as coffee grinds. Those hardcore bitches. So tired of the men who spilt them open like melons & seeded them with pomegranates & expectation. Oh, boo hoo, Medusa says to Eve. They think you’re weak, poor you. But then she takes it back. You’re right, she says, I’d rather be evil. Medusa sends her trained snakes to hiss & whisper to Eve as she sleeps. Aren’t you hungry, hungry, hungry. One white pill, one blue. You think Mary is the nice one; that’s what you intended. But she holds her reputation against Eve. Look, Mary says, they think I was a virgin. Who’s purer than me? No one knows about the men I took between my knees. No one cares about biology except when showing the inferiority of women. Mary & Medusa think we should all form a girl gang with Lilith & Delilah. After all, we all oppose the same overlord.

about the author
Kara Dorris

Kara Dorris

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks, including prose chapbook Carnival Bound [or, please unwrap me] (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, The Past Ten, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.