FORTUNE TELLING / SESTINA I

Today I googled where to get an image of my aura–

The idea of something emanating from me, fumes of cherry-blossom cheap

Impulse body spray in the PE changing room, or of becoming

a pink and orange lava lamp, light

suffusing in bubblegum globules, my head

a beacon, filled with glitter and warm with plastic.

It is important to not think too long about plastic.

You can pick up a milk bottle and feel the aura

of carbon radiating, life-like. I have to immerse my head

in a sink of cold water just to face up to the recycling, and those council bags aren’t cheap.

I can hold my hands up to the fridge light,

and in the webbing of my fingers catch a glimpse of what we might be becoming.

There is something comforting about becoming

rendered again in a haze of glucose pink unreality. Plastic

bubbles away at the edges of everything and mimics light,

a foam of questionable origin, a manufactured iridescence to the aura.

I want to while away my time here– I want to immerse myself in the spring of cheap

thrills. Instead I just come to, smelling of petrol, with a dull ache through my head.

Everyone is mostly just trying to keep their head

above the water. Under the surface, it is harder to ignore what our legs are becoming.

An amphibiousness is creeping in, heralded with cheap

sequins in place of scales, fins cast from no more than 50% recycled plastic.

The air fills with a chlorinated aura.

You float on your back, and focus on the light.

My grandfather was convinced that what would cure him was light–

Sitting in front of a device beaming violet, crimson, magenta, his head

crowned with its own silver-mercury aura.

I come from a long line of believers, each certain that becoming

healed and whole could be achieved through aluminium, prayer, or plastic,

always a solution held in what is bright and promising, quick and cheap.

I want to be able to make something of this, but everything feels cheap–

how can you paint a shining replication of a forest fire, without making light

of the actual inferno searing forth from that technicolour glory, plastic.

The fumes mix with the linseed oil and the turpentine, and the lightness of your head

brings visions of an undersea volcano, steadily becoming.

When it erupts you wake to find yourself under layered ash, transmitting a sulphuric aura.

The settling smoke reveals the set design to be cheap, as with the halo around your head.

In the haze of warm coral light, there are no warning signs to signal our becoming.

Your future is imprinted in the milk-bottle plastic; in the mirror, you glimpse an aura.

Loretta Riach is twenty-two, an artist and a writer, based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. They work with timescales and landscapes, and are an avid collector of trinkets and fossils. You can read their poems in previous issues of Sweet Mammalian, Starling, Minarets, Mayhem, or Takahē Magazine. They are a facilitator at play_station artist run space.