by Nicola Frassetto An Infinity of Fungi White crescents at my fingertips; button mushrooms, sliced and falling from my knife. Firm and bald, like a baby’s scalp. In my hand, this knob of flesh, fruited from centuries of quiet libido. In teeming forest subways, close to the trunk, mycena rise like typewriter keys, the livid orange of earwax. Oyster mushrooms pout, shirred waists, skirts curling in the wind. Their cousins tilt upright like Elizabethan standing ruffs. But underneath fungi as delicate as toenails, conceived in the warm fester of someone else’s death, gods hide. They have escorted popes to their heavens, and against their million overlapping lives death is fleeting. But my hands know the knife. We are united in the purpose of consuming our way to eternity. The mushrooms cook grey and small, needing salt and a little parsley. in the sky/light
I grew up knowing that once as a gift someone had gentled the sky into their palms and tucked it into the ceiling of my bathroom as if it were the plush glow of a jellyfish. The bathroom was my grotto, and its blue walls curled into breakers taller than I was, meeting at the opening way above where light came like someone had taken the lid off a bottle of moon; but at the floor light sifted down to darker blue where the tiles were cool, and sighed, and sank, a shoal of sleeping clams. Scuttling things sorted the dust in far corners, busy making little houses for themselves, and high on a wall one leafy tentacle dangled from a pot - the spongy body waited beneath. Light turned on the circle of the skylight, and fell in currents to settle like sand on everything below, and there was nothing that was not alive. Yet with the doors closed, all was still. Nicola Frassetto (she/her) is a student at the Queensland University of Technology, writing from Turrbal and Jagera land. She is obsessed with words, myths and butter, and her work has previously been published in lip magazine, Glass and ScratchThat. Her home on Instagram is @secretbeestungjournal.
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January 2025
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