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.
Budgies and shortlisting
October 1, 2024
Budgerigar
Ten million green commas punctuate blue sky,
quick breaths of swooping wonder, multiplied.
Water-hole is your target; liquid rope pulls you down
and the whole emerald sky is falling, diving,
as miniature bodies scoop into pool.
Your individual markings have taken you
further than native flight; outside the Louvre
I saw you, cold, trying to break in, as pointillist
as Pissarro but acrylic in your finish.
A proud but damp escapee from French balcony,
regretting the lost seed and the found liberty.
So plump and fresh, I have heard you were good eating,
a winging fast food charred to a turn;
as far from stringy battery chook as fingers in the fire.
Most know you singly; whistling in cages,
bowing and bobbing, rattling plastic mirrors.
Driven mad you ring and ring chink-chinky bells
or make love to that hard, hard-to-get reflection.
What joy to see you
just once, as you swoop,
one stitch amongst the tapestry,
a blade of grass in feathered turf carpet, magically landing,
transforming dreary waterside with that fallen sward of Eire.
Swift dragon of twenty million wings,
fluorescing with your simple, beak-filled joys.
PS Cottier
I have just returned from Boulia, in Queensland, about 300 km from Mount Isa, where I finally saw budgies in the wild. These have been my main target bird for ages, but they’ve always avoided me. We also saw wild cockatiels, which was wonderful.
***
In less ornithological news, I have two works shortlisted in separate national competitions. Firstly, my book Tuesday’s Child is Full (In Case of Emergency Press) is shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers (NSW) Book Awards for Poetry. This one is announced at a ceremony Sydney in late November.
Secondly, The Thirty-One Legs of Vladimir Putin, a novella manuscript co-written with NG Hartland, has been shortlisted for the 20/40 prize, run by publishers Finlay Lloyd. The main prize for this one is publication, so it will be a very exciting announcement later this month.
Tuesday poem: Four inch spiky heels
November 7, 2023
Sinking into grass
four inch spiky heels
she’s two bottles down;
her fascinator breaking
snaps like horses’ legs
PS Cottier
Tanka ‘Four-inch spiky heels’ first published in Poems to Wear: From Japan and Australia, ed. Amelia Fielden, Ginninderra Press, 2016
An apt poem for Melbourne Cup day.
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.
Tuesday poem via link: Amorphous Solid
October 11, 2022
If you go to this site, you’ll find a new poem I wrote called Amorphous Solid, which is about a person turning into glass. It’s included in an on-line journal called Liquid Imagination, which has been around for quite a long time. Have a browse around. Unfortunately this is the last edition of the journal. The Poetry Editor is John C. Mannone, and the Managing Editor is Sue Babcock.
PS Cottier 