Twat! – Naomi Leigh
May 2, 2025
Like a night club in the morning, you’re the bitter end
Like a recently disinfected shit-house, you’re clean ’round the bend
You give me the horrors, too bad to be true
All of my tomorrows are lousy ’cause of you
A zombie sun rises reluctantly over the endless expanse of Monday’s grey before it; over the cumulative inertia of the weekend which metastasized into puss; over the smoke-stained metallic arteries of a city choking, wheezing, suffocating, pleading for an air that will not come; over the huddled masses of exhaust fumes and the sputtering spokes spitting out metal beasts of rolling stock every 2, 4, 6—DELAYED—15 minutes from Queensboro Plaza into a metropolis that digests its mold-infested meat inside and grumbles, groans, heaves until it spits the rotten carcasses back out.
His blood is warm and red even before it’s oxidized. Crumbs of his morning’s Kalshi bar, moistened with his excreted saliva, cavort with specks of lint clinging desperately onto the fleece of his vest. He is sturdy, compact. He stands on the uppermost level, eyes still crusted nearly shut, bitter winds prying open the reddened urticaria around his flared nostrils, highlighting the cratered folds in face that will soon deepen and partition his chapped lips from his pork-fattened cheeks like the redlined streets below, like the eroded Queensbridge Houses taken down and shoved like Abner Louima against the sharp embankment of the East River below.
You put the shat in shatter, put the pain in Spain
Your germs are splattered about, your face is just a stain
You’re certainly no raver, commonly known as a drag
Do us all a favor, here . . . wear this polythene bag
He glances with disgust at the homeless man whose back is writhing against the jagged humps of the wood-peeled black tar bench, ribbed for his pleasure, hostile architecture penetrating vertebrae, absorbing the stench of his vomit-stained bomber jacket. He winces at this sight, causing specks of his eye-crust to fall like snowflakes onto the platform. He fashions himself like that curly-haired blond Marine kid, feels his cocaine cowboy heart pumping blood back into his shriveled cock and the veins of his biceps, flexing them both as he pictures the pose of the chokehold he’d assume. Would the vagrant snap out of his barbiturate-induced phase to even know what hit him, or would he just sputter out like an old engine? And what’s the fun in that? He thinks about the Vietnamese—or is she Hmong?—chick on the corner of his trading floor, working God-knows-what credentialed girlboss nonsense—human marketing resource communications project management associate—no, analyst, definitely analyst, she still has her fucking state school graduation year in her bio—who once told him in the huddled candlelit recesses of an unhappy hour at a kitschy Irish “bar and tavern” (he shuddered) in the congested organs of East Midtown—that she started taking an Uber home because the subway made her scared. She’d definitely suck his cock after that. Every woman adores a fascist. The homeless man groaned and he winced again, but the sound of the groan was eclipsed by the shrieking breaks of the 7 train, tarred rubber and metal beating one another into a temporary ceasefire which would soon be violated. He spits on the floor before boarding.
You’re like a dose of scabies
I’ve got you under my skin
You make life a fairy tale
Grimm
Beneath the cacophony, a Sunnyside family huddles in the corner of a pre-war co-op, rubber soles against linoleum flooring, mom whispering niceties in Nicañol to child, dad pleading in Spanglish, dirt-encrusted palms pressed against one another in unanswered prayer. The officer’s crusted lips are moving up and down and his tongue is bouncing off his chipped incisors but his voice is overpowered by the grainy incantations of the radio—“SRG BARRIER TRUCK HEADING TO, UHH, NORTH AVE AND UHH, NORTH 16TH STREET…TWO EDPs.” A hairy palm slams dad’s head against the kitchen’s back wall, teeth against drywall, sun-bleached skin blood red swirling with turquoise replastered wallpaper.
People mention murder, the moment you arrive
I’d consider killing you if I thought you were alive
You’ve got this slippery quality, it makes me think of phlegm
And a dual personality, I hate both of them!
The butcher arrives at his office stockyard on 56th and Park. It’s made of glass. The abattoir’s rotating doors slice its entrants one-by-one, whisking them through the marble lobby like impaled cattle suspended on meat hooks, legs trailing bodies. The vertical cattle cars, dim and gold, are devoid of interaction, stimuli, noise—except the dinging of each floor above a certain threshold—X, 25, 26, 27, 28—and the belabored breaths of the particularly overstuffed heifer in the opposite corner, pudgy facsimile of womanhood packed into a pantsuit.
At the very top floor of the slaughterhouse the cattle are transformed into man and woman and redeemed. A luminescence replaces the dimness of the cattle cars, a set of fluorescent pews welcome congregants, the altar of the wooden reception desk promises to vanquish sins for all those offering indulgences in the forms of magnetic ID badges—here lies the holy ground, the hallowed sanctuary—the trading floor.
Our butcher sits hunched over his desk, back arched into a sickle, eyes bleary and red, pricked trillions of times like acupuncture by legion hexadecimals in black and orange, crashing like waves from out of the Bloomberg terminal and into meatspace. He sighs, beaten and bloody air sacs in his lungs compressing like raisins, and scrolls to today’s verse:
“WATCHLIST
TICKER COMPANY NAME
LMT: US +8.487 (2.03%) Lockheed Martin Corporation
BA: US + 3.73 (2.06%) The Boeing Company
NOC: US + 9.85 (2.25%) Northop Grumman Corporation”
Propped like trophies on columns throughout the trading floor hovering above him, decapitated talking heads bleat on. Here, Max Headroom lives on through a million inhuman voices garbling in harmony as they drown.
The monitor closest to him is set to CNBC for the opening bell, and the guest’s grey eyebrows dance across his cratered forehead as the center of his sunken face remains furrowed and frozen: “You know, look, surely there’s some, uhh, incremental macro uncertainty from domestic politics that’s going to weigh on these defense names,” he mumbles, mouth warping into some half-crooked crescent resembling a smirk. “But we’re long on defense this year. We see a lot of room to grow. Between Israel and Ukraine plus rising tensions in the South China Sea, demand from key allies for integrated air and missile systems is exceptionally strong, and uhhh, this order book is only growing. There’s a lot of long-term opportunity here, so yeah, we’re very bullish…” The hosts nod solemnly, then are replaced by the regimented colorama of ads—diabetes lancets, gold ingots, invisible hearing aids, registered broker-dealers, full absorption menstrual pads, little blue marriage preservers.
You’re bad breath, vamps disease, destruction, and decay
Please, please, please, please, take yourself away
Like a death at a birthday party, you ruin all the fun
Like a sucked and spat-out Smartie, you’re no use to anyone
Like the shadow of the guillotine on a dead consumptive’s face
Speakin’ as an outsider, what do you think of the human race?
He spies her on the other side of the floor. He feels the phlegm gather in the back of his mouth and this morning’s black coffee-collagen powder-protein powder-omega-3 fatty acid fish oil-Adderall-creatine-Cymbalta stirring into a chartreuse-tinged witch’s brew in his stomach as he realizes she’s talking to that skinnyfat prick from the back office who still has pronouns in his email signature. And she’s giggling. She doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s wearing a fucking Timex and a chocolate brown belt with black tassled loafers. He shifts his gaze back to her, and feels the warm blood returning to his cock as he lets his perforated eyes devour her cropped two-piece tweed set whose double-breasted jacket reaches a hard stop just above her ass, which beckons to him as she leans over the desk.
But the butcher has company. Camped out in the bushes next to him is another throbbing cock and another set of binoculars—his associate the desk over is staring at her, too. He exchanges a knowing look with his stupid fucking direct report, who had the nerve to tell him Asian girls don’t have asses. His associate throws his hands up in surrender, bones cracking after being released from the chains attaching them to his keyboard and makes a mock bowing motion. “You win, bro, you win.”
You went to a progressive psychiatrist, he recommended suicide
Before scratching your bad name off his list and pointin’ the way outside
You hear laughter breaking through, it makes you wanna fart
You’re headin’ for a breakdown, better pull yourself apart
Outside, the dredging has done little to stop the hazardous wastewater in the Hudson and East River from rising. It rises ever higher against a city that can’t tell whether it’s still half-buzzed or just hungover off last night’s austerity diet, against the nauseous piers and swaying jetties off the West Side Highway, against the rotting tulip pots suspending Little Island above Chelsea, against the vomit-rusted burnt orange steel truss spans and viaducts of the Queensboro and Brooklyn Bridges, against the sinking, condemned, foreclosed island home where forever mingle the souls of the red-blooded and blue-blooded, the shock troops and the civilians, the living and the dead.
Your dirty name gets passed about when something goes amiss
Your attitudes, platitudes, just make me wanna piss
What kind of creature bore you? Was it some kind of bat?
They can’t find a good word for you, but I can: twat!