SPIT, SISTER

Raw intro:

In a bus station bathroom you
Hand me a diagram: how to separate meat from bone.

You say, “Nothing cuts deeper than your own hand.”

I change the subject:
“Have you ever noticed how we still sweat under our jackets even on fall days like this?”

I can smell the bulk of flesh on the collar of my sweater. My mouth fills with salt, profane.

You say, “Spit, sister.”

—

I can see your
Leopard print tattoo through a
Peephole in the stall.

Your water hits the toilet bowl as
My grip slips around a marker at the bottom
Of my bag.

In black Sharpie I leave a synopsis/vision:

“It’s a betrayal of instincts to despair in infertile ambience.”

If anybody knew us only by our hands,
They’d think we were twice our age.

—

With the last of the toilet paper you
Create a rough draft of a map
Based on Gemini logic:
contradictory, unpredictable,
moving through
synthetic elements of
infantile virtue.

At the end of an arrow, you’ve written “X MARKS THE SPOT.”

I want to tell you about the time when
I once believed I would grow up to be a
Wolf of a woman.

In this mirror, though, I am intolerant to confidence and all I can say instead is,
“Where do we go after this?”

SUPER MOON WEEKEND

In New York City I read your tarot cards.
They concluded that distance makes

The heart grow thunder.
You said you were changing your name to Corpus Christi;

We’d need to
Discard the bodies born of inbred temperament
to make it official.

—

“Gut me,” I said.
It was the start of a
Super Moon weekend,
just you, me, and a magic marker.

—

We’d heard the death of stars is
Brought on by song.
We thought: grindcore, necrothrash,
a swatch of black shadow and
asexual flatness.

On all fours, we dismembered:
superstitious rhythms,
worried timing,
nervous breakdowns.

—

We fell asleep at 6 a.m.:
Your tongue,

My dampness
On the floor,
Blank sheets and
Sour chords
Surrounding us.

—

Waking rushed us with
Diehard fanaticism.
I’d slept with bobby pins

In my hair;

They were now under
Your bare feet, lost in floorboards.
We woke with a
Corpse paint vocabulary,
Felt an untangling of the earth.
“Mars moves forward at midnight,” you said.

I blanched with the muscle spasm of inspiration,
repulsive in my agility.

Liz Worth is an author and poet whose debut, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond, was the first to give an in-depth account of Toronto’s early punk scene. Liz’s first poetry collection, Amphetamine Heart, was released in 2011, and her first novel, PostApoc, was released in October 2013. Visit www.lizworth.com.

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