Poetry by Rushika Wick
Cabinet
In the bathroom cabinet
are a collection of nail polish bottles
with names like Bombshell
and Indienne sky.
Each one has been used
only once, maybe twice.
Some have sat there for years,
their potency distilling.
There is never time
to draw the colour out
but occasionally
sunlight decays the lurid
pigments changing them,
in the same way your hands
now touch my waist.
The brush licks
my fingernails
warm like saliva
and midnight opens up.
With them present
and hidden away
there is the possibility
of Florence and Manhattan
or of violence and
consuming without end
until the sickness
makes me clean again.
A glass bottle
of words and minerals
for drinking
with rose petal cordial
or bloody steak.
You are something else
they say,
and that makes me
whole for that
short, sweet while.
Mollie
She saw the italics in blue skin-
Mollie-
taut across his neck
sea water ligaments
rippling beneath his surface.
They spelt out her name
singing across those broad plains
like the title of a book newly in print,
full of expectation and bloom,
glimpsed in the corner of his being
like a sharp intake of breath,
like filigreed sails
of electric possession.
She looked longer still
and saw the skin older, looser,
the lettering crushing
consent and craft
like a mortgage of the soul
trapped in dispersed and diffracted ink
seeping and eking through cells
as a dense weight started to
intoxicate her,
a ringing sound all around
scratching at her heart,
there could be no erasure-
the letters like an epitaph
in blackened rock.