Two Poems by Rushika Wick

I Pushed The Fear Away By Studying The Sky

after The Couple – Louise Bourgeois

YOUR BONES MARIA

(Golden shovel – ‘Heal Yourself’, Maria Sabina)

If air could heal!
(in the way you modify yourself 
using garments, bright pastels on the face, with
décolletage to space beautiful 
beads, a reliquary for love)

If sour air could bloom and 
purify itself like you, not scabbed by pressure, hot fire, always
beyond adjustment and exchange, remember
the power of blue sea stories, fog, then whiplash - you
gasping, stretching alveoli, you said we are
nothing without air, your whirring ventilator the
sleeping precursor to your true medicine

Note: Maria Sabina was a Mazatec curandero (native healer/ shaman/ poet) from Oaxaca State, Southern Mexico. She was the first contemporary curandero to allow westerners to participate in the healing ritual known as velada. All her work was sung or spoken only.

“Maria Sabina is one of the great figures of American shamanism. Her Chants is a masterpiece of indigenous visionary poetry. Her Life is the account of a woman who transcended her own culture and its material poverty to become one of the great women of the 20th century…To read her is to embark on a journey to the world of the extra sensorial.”- Homero Aridjis

Rushika Wick`s debut collection Afterlife As Trash was published in 2021 by Verve and highly commended in the Forward Prizes. She has work in Magma, Ambit, Poetry Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is developing a visual practice and is interested in magical ecology and social impacts on the body. She is also an NHS doctor and Children`s Rights advocate.