Double
The Camden Market psychic told me
I had a twin’s palm. Heart line splitting
in a way that doesn’t mean choices.
I half get it. That low voice between my eyebrows
that shouts in the artificial night –
buttery cinema darkness –
says No, or Now, or Bite.
I keep him checked, henpecked,
else he’d drag fresh-cut fingernails
over my hipbones,
gather all of April’s yellow
to spread thickly over the kitchen.
Sometimes I see him in my left eye,
feel his breath leave my right lung –
we’re a double helix.
Other days, I send him outwards
like a starfish ripping off a limb,
crab-meat-white and zombie-sinister,
to see and search and taste
the things I’m not supposed to lick.
Mostly, though, I like his nearness,
his hereness.
The world is built for two
and I have adapted.
Cora Ruskin is a lab technician who lives and works in Oxfordshire, UK. She is also an enthusiastic writer of poetry and fiction. She has had a poetry chapbook published by Dancing Girl Press, short fiction published in Fiction365 and even shorter fiction published in 101 Words. She blogs at www.corastillwrites.wordpress.com.
homologylit.com 