To the Pay Toilet by Marge Piercy
You strop my anger, especially when I find you in restaurant or bar and pay for the same liquid, coming and going. In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her shrieking their simple urgency like gulls. She's supposed to pay for each of them and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor. Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty black or whatever the prevailing bottom is getting thirty cents an hour to make sure no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door. Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources for the greatest good of the smallest number where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean and at the end of the row one free toilet oozes from under its crooked door, while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies wait and wait and wait to do what only the dead find unnecessary.
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