Tuesday poem: Fingernails
October 15, 2024
Fingernails
They never stop questing outwards, these epiphytic plants,
soilless roots tonguing the air. Mostly, we cut them into stubs,
mere bulbs awaiting final burial, asserting a sharp superiority.
Some men do allow them to snake their ways around and around,
until the hand becomes mere support for their rollercoaster ways.
Gone beyond decoration, the curling roundabout growths all indicate
each life's road and certain end. Some glue fake covers on each finger,
minute bright coffins jewelled with stones like Egyptian scarabs,
that once adorned the dead. But nails need never die. After host stops
they still grow, scraping coffins with cartilage, tusks of ivory feeling
for dirt long denied. Some are fed finally on fire, and burn with sticks
and hair and skin, external teeth closing on the jerking meal of flame.
A few succeed, reach dark earth, and plant themselves, and grow to men,
who carry new nails on clever, thumb-opposed fleshy tools,
deaf to the breathless emergent growth that tips each handy finger.
It crawls out, from the fecund pinkness, unstoppable; the quick tipped
living pointer, small flat shelled snail, that whispers of unseen bones,
and death that never dies, but clasps us tight as skull holds mind.
PS Cottier
Last weekend I was part of a poetry roundtable as Conflux, a science fiction convention here in Canberra, and read this freaky poem which has obvious horror tropes. Delighted to find this illustration by JA Knapp at the wonderful Old Book Illustrations to go with it! I particularly like the mushrooms growing in the distance. I wouldn’t be eating them any time soon…
‘Fingernails’ first published in Chiaroscuro: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words (ChiZine), Canada, Volume 47, Week 2, April-June 2011.
Poem (via link)
October 30, 2023
Very happy that my poem “Hip gnomes” was just awarded the Australasian Horror Writers Association Shadows Award in the poetry category for 2022. A great trophy! And everyone needs a tombstone arriving just before Halloween.
You can read the poem here, where it was first published at AntipodeanSF late last year. (That’s a link to Trove, which may take a little while to load.) AntipodeanSF is a free online publication that has been around for many years. Thank you to editor Ion Newcombe, and also to Kaaron Warren, who gave a speech on my behalf and picked up the award.
I’ve had two poems about osteoporosis published; this is by far the more fantastical (and dark) of the pair.
Monstrous arrival
June 4, 2020
My new poetry collection just arrived from the publishers, Interactive Press. As the title would suggest, it deals with some horrible creatures, from a re-working of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to killer garden gnomes, to sharks that eat suns, to aliens on a nineteenth-century lunar voyage. There’s also the dubious future of the game of cricket. There’s some disturbing stuff, and some humour too.
You can read more about the book here. And it can be ordered here. The print version is postage free to Australia and New Zealand, for a limited time.
Thank you to Kaaron Warren for the Introduction, and to Andrew Galan for providing a blurb. Also to Zoe Hartland for the suitably freaky gnome, and Geoffrey Dunn for the author photo.
I will be launching it sometime in Canberra (and possibly elsewhere), when gatherings become a little more feasible, and I hear that an on-line event for all IP books published this month will be held. David Reiter, the publisher, is organising that.
Of course I wish that the May launch could have occurred, but the book has won through, in all its manic strangeness. I can’t wait to read some of the poems aloud to an actual gathering!
PS Cottier 