Jacqueline Jules
![Jacqueline Jules Jacqueline Jules](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/JJulesWebPic.jpg)
Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman's Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com.
Mayo Clinic says
a woman has a shorter urethra
than a man, giving bacteria
a quicker trip to the bladder.
Was it even plausible to think
with that figure and that face,
Marilyn Monroe could succeed
in 1950 as something more
than the girl on the subway grate,
Wisdom presumably learned
from the stabbing death
of Kitty Genovese in 1964
and the neighbors who watched,
each waiting for the other to act.