and bad vibes. I smiled and said ‘how much?’
I found it on a velvet tablecloth
at a Chanukah art fair. Saw myself
in its craggy blackness. Every morning I fight
with the cheap clasp I picked up on Allenby
for 5 Shekel, 25 if you count the costume chain, to adorn
a thing that does nothing.
When I’m unfocused, I bring
its sharp corner to the hard bit
of my bottom lip. Feel
the scrape. Kiss the gold.
Tuck it under or over my top,
depending on where my neckline sits. I believe in God.
Amuse myself with the zodiac. But crystals
always felt like a step too far for me.
Wading into idol worship
or idiocy. My necklace is made of obsidian,
and the truth is, I only chose it
because I used this word, obsidian,
in the hardest poem I ever wrote. Let it be a metaphor
for the violence I survived, for the shattered life
I see everywhere like glass. I wear the crystal
on my chest. Stupefy it and cast it
in a crescent moon of fake gold. The poem
that no one will ever read. It's always with me,
wherever I go, so it might as well be pretty.
It might as well be mine.
Rachael Sevitt is a Scottish-Israeli poet. She is the recipient of the 2023 Andrea Moriah prize in Poetry, and an MA student in Creative Writing at Bar Ilan University. She lives in Jaffa, Israel, by the sea. Find her work at rachaelsevitt.com, across the web and in print, and on Instagram: @rachael.sevitt
