ysabetwordsmith | Poem: "Mrs. Opportunities, Ms. Nomers, and Miss Takes"

This is the freebie, inspired by a prompt from

wyld_dandelyon. It also fills the "I don’t need your help or your pity." square in my 4-1-23 card for the Gothic Bingo fest.

"Mrs. Opportunities, Ms. Nomers, and Miss Takes"

People put too much emphasis
on titles, on things that aren't about
rank or role, on strangers talking
about each other's love lives.

They want to know whether
women are married or unmarried ...
whether they're still on the market.

They want to know gender, too,
when it's rarely relevant to work
or casual social interactions --
when it would be far simpler
just to call everyone "Per." for
person or even "Pri." for primate.

It's no wonder that women snap,
"I don’t need your help or your pity."

It's become a comedy of errors
written in Mrs. Opportunities,
Ms. Nomers, and Miss Takes --

and people are running out of
patience with a culture that
thinks with its honorifics.

* * *

Notes:

Gender-neutral titles do not encode gender or marital status like Mrs. or Miss do. Ms. drops the martial coding but not the gender coding. Per. and Pri. are among the alternatives that encode none of that.