This poem is spillover from the July 6, 2021 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by prompts from ng_moonmoth and Anonymous. It has been sponsored by ng_moonmoth . This poem belongs to the Daughters of the Apocalypse series. "Everything Turned Upside Down" [0 A.E.] In the way that everything typically was, the Grunge was designed for healthy white men. The noxious vapor sought them out and targeted them with unparalleled ferocity, killing combat-capable people far more than any other group. It killed women, too, but not as many as men. It killed people of color, too, but not as many as white people. It killed the young and the old, but mostly the middle-aged, the adults in their prime. It killed people with disabilities, but it killed more of the able-bodied, and those it didn't kill were often left with whole new handicaps. It killed the transgendered and the queer, but mostly it killed the cisgendered straight people. The Grunge was so tightly targeted to credible threats that it changed the demographics among survivors. Now men and boys were a minority, greatly outnumbered by women and girls, and people of in-between identities had become a larger percentage of the total. There were far fewer white people, and they weren't a majority in many places anymore, instead jumbled in with the survivors of many other colors. And who had time to worry about that old business, anyway? People were too busy just trying to survive in a world gone mad, where production had ground to a halt and scavenging would not work forever either. In some areas, children and teens outnumbered adults, while in others the numbers were closer to even but still hard for the adults to handle. Like everyone else in the Aftermath, people with disabilities did what work they could, and everyone else was grateful that it had gotten done. Nobody worried about lesbians anymore -- with so many women and so few men, what else were people supposed to do for company? Some said that gay men were selfish, but most felt that men had lost so much that they deserved whatever comfort they could find in each other. Besides, few people felt like raising babies right now. It was a world inhabited by the very old and the very young, by women and genderqueer people, by blacks and Hispanics and folks of mixed backgrounds. Everything was turned upside down, but given the way it had been before, maybe that wasn't a bad thing. * * * Notes: In modern America, the "model human" is a straight white man , that is, in each category a member of the preferred group. This appears everywhere from medical studies to product design . So things designed for straight white men may work less well, or not at all, for many other people. This is deeply entrenched for many complex reasons, and efforts to fix it -- once people finally noticed the problems -- have been slow to make progress. Having been designed exactly the same way as most other things, the Grunge targeted humans more severely the closer they were to the "model human," with higher survival rates in every other category. In entertainment, the marked case dies first. Examples include Black Dude Dies First and Bury Your Gays . Due to the design of the Grunge, however, the pattern is reversed in this context. The straight white men die in droves, while those who are queer, ethnic, female, etc. had a higher chance of survival. The effects are so dramatic as to cause massive changes in demographics such that the "model human" has become the least common type.