Two Poems

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.