Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert

Just Act Natural

                                          
Take your desire for cruelty and put on a show
When you put on a show you have to modulate your voice

If you’re going to put on a show, better serve wine and libations
It’s important to keep things romantic: rose petals, candles, really put on a show

Put on a show of looking really busy at work
He certainly put on a show but as usual no one was paying any attention

It is possible you may one day coin the motto of an age—until then, just put on a show

Fake it till you make it, they said, but now that I’ve made it I still put on a show
Only say “Put on a show” to a bartender you trust

We wanted to put on a show for them but didn’t have any wigs or anything
If you put on a show, identity becomes more evidently a masquerade

You try to be sincere and it feels fake so you put on a show
It smelled like ketchup when I got off the train, so I put on a show of sniffing the air

You can act crazy and put on a show in bed but you have to live with yourself in the morning
Oh great I guess we all have to put on a show now

The task of the press is the education of the masses, but 9 times out of 10 they choose to just put
on a show

To better dramatize the conflict of logic versus faith, why don’t you put on a show?
​We agree to put on a show because we’re too tired not to
​

The Cyclical Nature of Fashion


The former practice of 7-digit dialing was overtaken by 11-digit dialing last Sunday
This arises from the former practice of installing doorbell-like mechanisms in coffins

I tried to explain to my mom that the former practice of turning out lights every time you leave a
room doesn’t apply to fluorescents, but she wasn’t having it

I guess the former practice of kissing during sex has been retired

I’m revising the former practice of introducing non-diagetic music to my films; from now on, the
characters will be able to hear the soundtrack, but the audience will not

We need to bring back the former practice of being massively dope and in your face
It can’t exactly be the former practice if we’re still actively doing it

The former practice of “the happy dance” has been replaced with the inward smile
This particular cliché describes the former practice of pursuing a pet topic—can you guess what it
is?

Yes, we’re irreligious now; we never fully embraced the former practice of praying anyway
The former practice of appearing live, in actual size makes you seem all the smaller now

The loss of the former practice of the smoking break has actually decreased productivity
The former practice of sleeping with the fishes has been replaced by only sleeping with the fishes
you really love

If we have to be in the office all day, can we bring back the former practice of naptime?
Regarding scholastic aptitude tests: was the former practice to know the answers, or to guess?

The former practice was to choose a “trade school” if you weren’t a man of means
Establishing a secret question was the former practice; at present the policy is no questions asked
 

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a non-profit dedicated to the publication of literary work in hybrid genres. Her first collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from feminist publisher Switchback Books, and her collaborative collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (co-written with Elisa Gabbert) was published by Otoliths in 2008. Her latest chapbook, After Robinson Has Gone, has just been released by Greying Ghost Press.

Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Pleiades, Salt Hill, and Sentence, among other journals, and her nonfiction has appeared in Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, and The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics. She currently lives in Boston and blogs at The French Exit.