DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DO TO ME WHEN YOU LEAVE? 

My buzzer rings reality 

Burnt toast, eggs cooked rubber 

My ribs fold in half, my lungs 

Become two 

Wet rings on wood 

I put my paw on your chest 

Smell your blood moving, 

A creek beneath your skin 

Oh! what it means to be alive 

Yearning and knowing 

I’m not special because 

Everyone loves you, the 

Way spit gathers in your mouth, 

I long for the familiar cruelness 

Of bodies already known to each other 

The way my hands stick 

To my tits when it’s hot 

If I could, I’d cut the meat 

Out of my lust 

Put it in the freezer 

With the bananas 

Make it last forever.

HUMILITY 

Feet to feet, knees splayed, my body

the mouth of mama’s fruit 

bowl, the one where the bananas grew

muddy and smelled of delicious 

decay 

I lie beneath a white sky of scarred

plaster & dream 

of taking an ice pick 

plunging it into my hip points 

cracking myself open like 

a two headed egg, the ones 

with twin yolks 

embryonic angel numbers 

What if I hid 

parts of my face in all 

the photographs taken of me 

a web of fingers, an eye poking 

out, maybe invest in a pair 

of those large bug eyed sunglasses,

a plastic witch mask, pupils pecked

out so I can see, no matter what 

always incomplete 

like those Greek statues at the MET

destroyed by divine timing, take me

in but spit out what you don’t understand

(all of it) 

Coffee withdrawals will be the death of me,

why can’t I have anything nice? 

Martinis those broke boys bought me,

a smashed clock, ominous about nothing

that line of coke that wily coyote gave me

I wasted it rubbing it into my gums

Shaking like a washing machine all the way

back to his bungalow, the tiled dolphin

at the bottom of his pool 

Kitty hated the people out there but I liked

being a fly on the wall 

having no thoughts other than visions,

a godless cloud

GARDEN VARIETY DEPRESSION 

Nana says men are like streetcars 

I think about gravity and death 

What color is your heart? Steel 

You point two fingers to your temple cock the trigger Bang

I lick the wallpaper and send you away

Catherine Spino is a writer, performer and a couple sandwiches short of a picnic. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Rose Books, House of Vlad, ExPat Press and more. She is from the East Coast.