Featured Poem II • May 2017
The Fetch
Jessica P. Wick
The Fetch has taken my brush. My silver-backed pearl-handled wicked little brush: its teeth biting gloss from my hair in shivery ripples. I forgive the Fetch my reflection, my image, and my lover. The Fetch has my eyebrows, my grin, my wet eyes. It has taken my bed, my chair, my sanity. It has taken my mother’s lace jacket and it has taken my old love affair with the ashen antique scent of lavender soap. But now the Fetch has taken my brush. I skulked home one night and saw its shadow—my shadow, damn! —on the wall and the brush in its hand and the light shivering on its hair like a little candle flame set in an open window, and it is enough. The Fetch was sent, a swaggering bully, to press me into Death? It shall not. My brush. Mine. My eyes. Mine. My hand. Mine. My grin. My friends. My chair. My lace. My kitchen has the sharpest knives. The Fetch’s smug mask is an exacting facsimile—so I must be the Fetch and fetch my own life back. The kitchen has the sharpest knives—and they shall not be brushed aside. The Fetch will leave, not I.
Jessica P. Wick is a writer, poet, and an editor of poetry at Goblin Fruit. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, Cabinet des Fées, and Jabberwocky. She has recently moved from the West Coast to the East and when she isn’t dipping her toes in the sea she is regarding the first snow flurries with wide-eyed wariness.
She tells us that “The Fetch” was “the first poem I wrote after making a rather dramatic and Trust-to-the-Luck-of-the-World-and-Good-Friends life change, when I was thinking a lot about what I want a life well-lived to look like … doppelgangers, homunculi, and witches, as you do.”
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