Poetry by Naoise Gale

                           ​collective nouns CC


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Rose

She crushes rose petals with a paperweight. Bleeding
Perfumed sap – white powder, molten glaciar – she 
Snorts tiny pink fragments small as plastic beads. Girl
Becomes rosewater legend, skin pinker than flamingos
Or her two-year-old daughter’s bedroom walls. Nose
Is chapped and leaking raspberry lemonade, sickly
Calpol and dip-dyed lava. Eyes bulge like pastel candy
Shrooms and head droops like wilted bud, all sputtered
Potential. Girl thinks, ‘This is medical. This is sacred,’ 
Before her sugar-veins clog and rupture, like those
Roses in a vice, pressed into artistic submission. If
Girl is flower power under floral spell, she is 
Weak as daisy chains when she wakes, in a white
room, no bouquets in sight.

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Before You

Before I was half-pill and absence,
Before I was ice cubes in a tinkling
Glass, before I was blue fizz in the 
Parched afternoon, I was good
Girl at the front desk, arm raised
In the air like one thin butter knife.
I was scrawled equations and 
Poached eggs on toast, oil coating
My gaping mouth, I was dumb
Tulips and the hushed gasp
Of a teacher “One-hundred per 
Cent again”. Before shitty
Knickers and puked cookies,
I was all there, vibrant, anxiety
Girl with her paranoid magic
Powers. I was the fizzle of 
Diet coke in my belly and the echo
Of skulking words in my mind
And the crunch of an apple
In a perfect, heart-shaped
Mouth. Before I was you, I 
Was me, boring little girl, 
Arrogant, all pine and Nordic
Furniture. Boring little girl,
But myself.

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Naoise Gale is a twenty-year-old Modern Languages student living in Italy. She writes poems, short stories and novellas about mental health and eating disorders. Her work has been published numerous times in Young Writers’ UK anthologies.

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