Much Convenience and Inconvenience work involves subverting the more obvious meaning of a text or an image.
In this Inconvenience, the writer uses a patent application (for a device meant to help people avoid poison) as her source.
She subverts the patent’s message by suggesting that poison can be inserted into the device itself, thus spreading contagion.
Convenience scholars have located her source document: Improved Device for Distinguishing Bottles and the Like which Contain Poison by Eliza Cutler, published in 1902.
Provisional Specification
Improved Device for Proliferating Dreams which Contain Poison
This invention can readily and quickly form breakage, within reasonable limits.
The word “poison” moulded on the surface of the bottle
CONTAINS THE POISON.
