PS Cottier

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.