Rushika Wick

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Gravity Boots

Your voice was
Motown
frozen in acid,
thawing out at dawn
in the Nevada desert.

Your embrace was
a pair of gravity boots within
an exercise in weightlessness.

Your walk was
like a time machine slowing
detail, casting a magnifying lens
over surface.

Your wit was
like one magpie being joined
by another;
broken shells hanging
from beak as the sun sets.

Your words rest
within this vacant mansion
of my heart;
marionettes with their strings
laid to rest.

Inanimate but present.
​

On Grief

Grief is an intensely private thing.
It seeps around the edges of floating paper like developing liquid
until gradually the outline of a human being comes into resolution.
It turns nightsong of small birds into melancholy
and tips the fairground ride of life upside down in a tragic accident.
But we paid so much for the tickets - how can this be allowed?
Perhaps whoever arranged this thinks that if we are launched up 
into space on the Big Dipper we might forget- 
heady with adrenalin and Andromeda..
They are wrong.
It is said that there are distinct stages of grief like ink 
separating out into component colours, crawling along blotting paper...
But all I see is red, eyes closed and looking at the sun.
​

Cardiac Rehab

Listening to the radio
on the experiences of young people waiting for heart transplants
(hope and diminution in equal measure; a pendulum ride)
I have a compulsion
to donate mine
now- immediately.
If only I could survive without mine
to give the boy his ...
A strange idea?
Ripping open the rib cage and proffering a
bleeding
beating
heart
to someone who is desperate for it;
The ultimate demonstration of love
The destruction of the possibility to love
in
one
fell
swoop.
Let Them Eat Cake by Poe
Or, do I need to thread my needle
And
start
sewing up
my own collapsing
atria?
​

Eyes like Cherries

My eyes look like cherries
my mother said, a hundred miles
away and on the phone.
I thought at once that this
was alarming
and also an unusual comparison
of prized fruit and anatomy.
An amalgam of kitsch doll
and catholic stigmata story.
I wanted to rush to her,
hold her and tell her no- they
were not; they looked like eyes- it would be OK.
But I also wanted to ask if her heart 
felt like a pulpy mango neglected
in the bowl
and if this was what she truly wanted
to talk about.
​

Rushika Wick's profile

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Trench Soliloquy

Dusk/ bomb-light.
My eyes telegramming
My heart STOP
My mouth tasting
magnesium white
STOP
Ears cradling wave upon wave
of air breaking on
Labyrinthine coast,
Martello towers
of tiny bone
fracturing.

Looking down into hands
which I no longer possess
I somehow morning-catch
the letter carried by moths from
the Wonderland
that is my pocket,
And bend my knees
closer to the
black loam
soon
to be my bed.

I try to make out vitality
distilled
into the green of the grass
but light leaches from the booming sky,
Rendering colour to spirit shades.
I collapse into
The smallest shape possible
Like a broken heart.
My heart -An Anemone in a tidal rock pool,
Somehow I must read your words.

And there it is
My Lucifer
A glow worm
In the tarry night
Hanging onto the blade of grass before me-
One of many across
the dwindling horizon-
Changing the scene to a love story,
Stars for the Fallen,
Twinkling like childhood past,
Torches lighting
a rabbit tunnel
back to Hope.

My hands become my own
again and softly I grasp
the creature;
I hold it up gently between
Forefinger and thumb
It's incandescence
Revealing words from you-
Crawling to rescue mine
in these last minutes,
lit by glow worm light,
Luciferin and Luciferase..

In this stage of the life cycle
The glow worm
Exists only to consummate
It cannot eat and will
Die after a few days.
The light flickers in the cavern
Of my hands.
Around me -a furred halo.
​

The Lovers

They nuzzled together in
summer light
cocooned in floating blue nylon
under the bridge;
discarded litter swimming
ahead like heraldry.
Commuters walked past.
He -with his face turned away,
Indigo sleeping bag pulled up about his ears,
She -facing the world.
Cloud blonde and contemplative.
Smoking.
Face lit from one side like a Braques or Bladerunner mermaid,
Viewing the punters on the bus
in their Vaudeville Show
and feeling good about herself
against the warmth of his limbs,
the escape from her solitude.
​

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