Needlestick by Scott-Patrick Mitchell
Content warning: discussion of drug use and associated harms.
After the sting, a red jewel: fingertip glistening. I should’ve known better than to blindly check his drawers. Should have read the signs. How my brother is disappearing. His room filled with half a dozen glasses of water, each filled a third of the way. The crumpled tissues, unfolding to reveal a dark brown floral heart. My blood, a hammer in my head, calculating. Is the doctor open? I turn: my brother is there, soft-footed, in the doorway. He goes to shout but I lift my finger. The bead of blood is louder than both of us.
Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary poet who lives as a guest on Whadjuk Noongar Land. In 2019, they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award and The Wollongong Short Story Prize and were recently shortlisted for the 2020 and 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. Scott-Patrick’s debut poetry collection, Clean, will be released early 2022 from Upswell Publishing.