Gender-Neutral Bathroom
Ode to Pissing
I go over to Lorraine’s on Thursdays to lift her onto the toilet.
The vinyl sling creaks, sings, and for a moment, above her powerchair,
she levitates, which is usually magical, but today she is only pissing.
•
There is supposed to be something magical about pissing. All these extra-
vagant necessities: the frescoed ceiling as shelter, or singing and syrups
when we are forced to eat. There must be some melodrama left for excretion.
•
I put on Melodrama and lift the toilet seat to piss while the shower warms up.
Outside the bathroom, Eli flickers the lights on and off, a homemade
strobe, just a miniature rave for you, darling, and I listen to him sing.
•
The song of piss on porcelain. Lorraine and I talk dreams of bathhouse raves,
disabled teachers, careers in porn. I ask how she became so comfortable
with friends wiping her and she shrugs, lifts her shoulders, checks if she’s done.
•
Juliana and I squeeze shoulder to shoulder into the stall at Woody’s.
The muffled singing, our laughable sweat, go piss girl, and I lift the gloss
to her lips while she sits there, every stickiness part of the night’s piss-drunk ritual.
•
Last year, in the bathroom of the library stacks, a boy whom I had never seen
piss lifted my shirt, sang his tongue down my torso, and I think
of my silence, all of the disordered words that I never put in concert for him.
•
We sing along from the concert bathroom, Clay draining his catheter
of piss, Sarah emptying her ostomy bag. We joke that this is what disabled people
do in stalls instead of coke, then Helen lifts a baggie, asks if we want any coke.
•
How Eli has to lift himself onto his toes to kiss me, how the kissing frees
my tongue of sensemaking, and before any more touching: I have to piss first
I’m so sorry. He grins, runs off while I queue up a song about flashing lights.
•
AWOLing the night out, I lift myself across the city, run after words
that won’t walk home together. Home in the bathroom, I curl on the tile’s
cold song, schizophasia babbling like piss around a drain that will not clear.
•
I think that cold part of my body that is supposed to produce shame is disabled too. I lift
my eyebrows, nod, wind toilet paper around my hand like a song on loop.
Lorraine clarifies: I’m not just some incontinent woman. I’m a bitch who shits.
•
Unclear when Eli found me, only that he did, only that he lifted
my body from the piss-stained floor, the Seroquel to my mouth,
and in bed he sings the lullaby out of order so I might understand the words.
•
And Lorraine tries to lift from me the shame that, for her, has lulled.
Her question: What moment made you realize you could piss in front of Eli?
My quiet shock. When I couldn’t speak straight, he suggested I sing.
