Rules for b_____s
- B_____s are repulsive and disgusting, especially the clear curved cat’s eyes and the large four-holers.
- Do not touch them.
- Particularly never touch a b_____ with the first two fingers of your left hand (the ones you suck).
- Don’t let a b_____ touch you.
- NEVER let a b_____ near your mouth.
- If you have to touch a b_____, as on a winter school blouse, make sure your hands are dry.
- Train your younger brothers to hate b_____s.
- Play chasing games where you run from the one who calls out Button germs!
- Try to ignore the b_____s other people wear.
- Don’t think about the time you saw the second-grader sucking his cardigan b_____.
- If you think of b_____s, or of the word button, spit twice onto your right-hand index and middle fingers and fling the spit away.
- Somehow the ones on little stems are not as bad.
- The metal ones are fine: the square ones on the blue cardigan Grannie knitted you; the oddly nipple-positioned b_____s on the dress your mother bought you; the metal stud in jeans.
- If your mother buys you winter pyjamas with b_____s along one shoulder, carefully fold a tissue and place it over them as you sit up reading in bed.
- If your mother refuses to make you a zippered school uniform like your friend’s, and even adds an extra b_____ ‘because there was space’, cry helpless, bewildered, outraged tears.
- If, when you are 12, your mother (intransigent in spite of years of protest) buys you a dress for Christmas with three decorative plastic b_____s on the front, cut them off. Ignore her huffy faux surprise.
- Make a permanent shrine in your heart for the tracksuits you had when you were five — one red, one green — which you loved for their colour, their sturdy construction, the soft warm fuzz inside them, and the radiant safety of their buttonlessness.
Tricia Dearborn is an award-winning poet, writer and editor whose latest books of poetry are Autobiochemistry and She Reconsiders Life on the Run. She has been a guest poetry editor for various literary journals, most recently Cordite 112: TREAT (2024), and a judge for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize.