Afterlife as Trash

Rushika Wick

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781912565566
• eBook ISBN: 9781912565948
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Rushika Wick's poems are works of great imaginative power, both formally and in terms of their contents. In the exuberant opening poem of this collection, 'Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding', she is by turns the president, Matisse, a love letter, the weather, a badger; 'the experiment is boundless / like the imagination of a new subspecies /of giant squid / immeasurable and brilliant, / its owner perceived as a delicacy.' It is a poem that seems to stand as a sort of manifesto for the whole book, which feels like poetry that contains such energy it has started to wriggle free from the usual constraints of subject and form. But unlike so much experimental poetry, the reader is brought along for the ride and encouraged to feel the wind in their hair. Characters appear - Camille Claudel, Michael Knight, Lady Chatterley - only to vanish again in a single line once their work is done. Poetic forms are introduced only to be blown apart, words scattering across the page like paint-spatter, letters vanishing to reveal deeper truths. These poems are so full of life even as they acknowledge the stark realities that are a risk to life - also the very real presence of death. And everything is here. And trash is everywhere. And the wind is blowing it and us. It is exhilarating!

'The poems in Rushika Wick's debut collection are like little time bombs, packed with shocking and beautiful truths about how we live, what and who we love, how we die. They often feel as if they've been translated from a mysterious language or passed on in whispers – their imagery is so rich and strange and compressed – but always in the moment and pushing against conventional lyric and form. She approaches her subjects with a forensic eye and a deft scalpel, getting to the heart of what's vital.'

– Tamar Yoseloff

Falling & Seeing Language

The cigarette end glowed,

made tiny golden rain as she threw it to the ground.

She started to run, was late, always late

(in the book she is reading this signals narcissism)

Wind carried a fine mist, drunken birds few across the street,

seemed like earth was opening up in unexpected ways,

trying to talk, revive an old language.

Abruptly, she fights to catch her breath, she has tripped, is falling

down

the

steps,

moving through the air,

everything slows

down.

She recalls her early time experiments as a child.

Moving steadily to see if seconds could be stretched,

walking and looking into a mirror held

face-up to the ceiling,

floating across inverted terrains punctuated

by zero gravity lampshades, pale puffballs,

to answer the question, does being inverted alter your sense of time?

She is grateful that her parents had left her alone.

Interference in development is dangerous under certain conditions,

making fast meals like a pressure cooker.

The catapult shifts her perspective,

she sees herself

moving across the clay blue of the sky like a tiny doll

relative to everything for miles around,

like in an opera or Victorian novel.

She had taught Dickens for many years in schools across the city,

sees that she too is a character,

ebbing and flowing at the whim of the city`s machinations

only dreaming of autonomy.

Heart in throat,

being seen like a splash of blood against the grey sky,

wanting to be unseen, aching at who would be seeing this, the singular act of falling.

Something pulls at her heart like the witch doctor on the jungle suspension bridge

in Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom,

her heart feels like it is coming to the surface,

feels ready to leave, blushing, lavender-hued

it is bleeding sighs, bleeding that she never had a chance to visit the Venice Biennale,

to learn to paint, wear dungarees for a year, to sip tea with toasted almonds like

in the great French books.

Who would hold this muscle in their clenched fist?

Or, to whom would she make a donation of it?

Conrad for his Heart of Darkness

Or the mute boy on the Reading train when she was fifteen

Or her friend who was made entirely of music and ether

Or her mentor who taught her to see the interdependence of everything

like some sort of Greek oracle?

She could even see inside of the heart, the glimmering muscle,

the power,

the necessary order of transit through the chambers, the flush.

Heart has memory. Transplant recipients have new life and

harbour old life too,

another life within their own. How companionable perhaps.

The heart as motif, I will wear my heart upon my sleeve - the

bard as oracle or life-coach.

The Queen of Hearts, that’s what she had been.

Nothing lofty or extraordinary, except that kindness is the best

magic her mother had always said.

The best magic for what?

She feels strings vibrating all over her body - some of silk,

others more like hessian, coarse, pulling her in all directions, she is trussed up.

The strings are accountable for the distortion of time and she thinks

she sees an albatross, an echo of the Ancient Mariner.

No filmic series flashing before her, this is a messy collage,

no - not even that - this is a becoming of all things. A resting place of being.

A keeping of everything in mind, alive and humming.

Spent her whole life searching for this to find it loitering at the exit...

Flying, soaring high about the Zoroastrian moment,

with joy - feels like bursting, finds she is laughing, the colours around her

pulse fresh of the surface of trees, sky, heart.

It is raining luck.

Here is her daughter coming into focus,

their conversation is faster than a heartbeat, elastic, shining,

starts with apology.

At this opening there are hailstones

droplets in her voice condensing in thick sky and bouncing,

hard, to her sister, for being so absent and distracted,

to her partner for being irritable with his habits

even to Dog for not walking her in the rain

and many, many more sorrys in ice, bouncing all over

the pavement

off...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Diaries Of An Artist In Hiding
• ULTRAMARINE PINK PV15
• Deus Ex Machina
• The Party
• The Friends
• The Dog
• The Flea
• Love Island
• It Is Raining And Everyone Is Fading
• Cut-ups
• Elite Members Of The Momentariat
• The Thoughts Of Valerie Solanas (in the minute before shooting Warhol and the minute after)
• Why I Cannot Watch Most Films Twice
• Section 2 Of The Mental Health Act
• Hair
• Parakeet Earrings
• The Pill
• After Reading A Rewilding Book
• Baba Yaga In Her Life As A Teacher
• The Time An Eagle
• Love Can Be Found In The Ruins
• My Identical Twin
• Vocal Tics
• In The Tower That Night
• Il Telefono Giallo Nella Casa Gialla (Dopo Van Gogh)
• Yellow Phone In The Yellow House (After Van Gogh)
• Blue Period
• Cameo Brooch Of A Young Woman
• Erosion
• Table Settings
• Breathe
• Athens Is The New Berlin
• Green As Supreme Emperor
• Dinner for One
• Old Ladies of the European Countryside
• Red Eggs
• 519 People
• Making The Most Of Space
• Falling & Seeing Language
• You Are Wondering About The Past Life Of The Radio Anthropologist
• Gaia in the Live Lounge (COVID 19 Pandemic 2020)
• Acknowledgements
• About Verve Poetry Press