POEM: The end

BY PETER CLIVE

Do not fear death. Beauty
is a premonition of death.
It shows us the world without us,
and teaches us there is no end,
just a different point of view.

POEM: INTERPELLATION or Avril’s Double: Real And Symbolic Suicide*

BY NOAH SWINNEY

Althusser’s slip-slops hit against his heels
In time to the music in his ears:
Hey, hey, you, you! I don’t like your girlfriend!
He hums along. Looks around—
Gives a little skip. A slop falls off.

 

 

 

*This poem refers to the Fake Avril Lavigne conspiracy theory. The line ‘Hey, hey, you, you! I don’t like your girlfriend!’ is the chorus from Lavigne’s single, Girlfriend.

POEM: The pozi shack

BY MOAGI MASIKE

The pozi shack,
It stands near the tuck shop,
Simple as it is

Not too tall,
It boasts it’s medium-height,
A worn and rustic beauty

It has a chimney,
And two windows with cardboards as
The window panes and a house number
On the old door

The red stoep, like a white lady’s lips,
Shines from a distance,
Mama had polished it before we opened
Our eyes in the morning

Food retailer catalogues clinging to the wall,
Buckets filled with overflowing water
And a candle is on the rickety table,
And my deceased father’s chair still
Standing there

Our pozi shack,
Built tough by rough, overworked hands
Of half-drunk men, chatting about
Football and “tarven stories” in the heat

I loved it on rainy days,
As the raindrops landed on the rooftop,
I listened to the pitter-patter of the
Raindrops and became sleepier by the
Minute

POEM: Mother’s Golden Bracelet

BY KAY UGWUEDE

My mother once had a golden bracelet.
It became mine in the manner that things mothers own
become their daughters’.
Far away from home it’ll become a relic,
a memory of Sunday mornings,
the smell of warm milk,
of Sunday bests off the bottom of my mother’s brown trunk.
The smell of newness in the red earth.
Of my father’s cologne.
The drives to Sunday morning masses in his grey Peugeot.
A million laughters, late night stories and Amens.

POEM: Distance

BY NDABENHLE S. MTHEMBU

What does ‘relationship’ mean
A test to see if we relate?
Do I relate to You?
Am I relatable?

What does ‘sex’ mean
A test to see if we are the same sexually?
Do I find You sexy?
Am I sexual?
Am I sexy though?

What does ‘intimacy’ mean?
A test to see if we are close enough to disagree?
Do I find You agreeable?
Am I the distance between us though?

What does ‘love’ mean?
A test to see if we mean anything?
Do I find meaning in You?
Am I meaningful?

Oh, I see.
The only distance between us is You and me.

POEMS by Abbey Khambule

I see you

(for Tshego)

You have my mother’s eyes.
Unassuming.
I see her
in your selfies.
Updates, Posts, Statuses: reshuffling
of your thousand smiles, profiles.
Apple of my eye, ebbing away with
the ever-changing timeline.
In updates of your becoming I wonder
did I miss your new post;
status of your belonging to a new world?
I see you
in her Kodak eyes.
It’s always been you
extending her; extending yourself;
extending the cosmos; reaching,
calling unawares against
my unmaking.

 

Winter in Bophuthatswana

Fire ants fall
from a winter tree

Coppery skeleton army
warring with the cold wind

Like a shepherd boy
I lead one warrior to my dry cold feet

Let him sting the skin between my toes
so I can burst into summer

POEM: Trying Not to Think of Seamus Heaney

BY ANTHONY WILSON

I ease the mower
beneath blackberry stems
and think instead of my mother
who has just called me Angus

Stooping to pick a few of the immense dark
planets I try not to think
of my mother already losing
the word for blackberries

who picked blackberries as a child
and took them home to her mother
who knows blackberries
in three languages

each planet of thought
soft between my thumbs
Trying not to think
of my mother I think of grass

POEMS by Jeannie Wallace McKeown

BY JEANNIE WALLACE MCKEOWN

Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs make themselves at home
in my garden.
Strutting, preening, pecking
at the earth
as if it is theirs –
worms, seeds, old fruit.

They know that this territory
is contested;
with alarm they arise, flustered,
glide between trees, calling
urgently to one another
as the cat stalks, forgets, stops to wash.

Settling again, alert and ruffled,
they watch.
It wasn’t always this way, glinting eyes hint.
“When we had teeth,” the birds chirp, the birds coo,
“careless mammal, it was you
who was fleeing from us.”

Melamine Cowboy

The melamine cowboy plate broke.
It lasted longer
than much of the china crockery.
That cowboy lived in our kitchen
for over a decade.

Now he’s in the bin.

But that melamine cowboy
won’t biodegrade.
He’ll ride the landfill express
into all our sunsets.

Should humanity survive
to vacate, he’ll be there
to see silver craft shoot upwards,
people queuing to leave the earth behind
having covered it in plastic straws,
disposable nappies,
single use coffee pods.

With their departure,
perhaps new grass will finally
grow over him.
He’ll ride the deep earth,
content:
substrate cowboy
with a story to tell.

POEM: The First Day of School

BY ADRIAN SLONAKER

Since the labour pains promptly followed
the devouring of a veggie vindaloo,
the baby was named “peppery”
in Esperanto, the lingua franca shared by
her Hungarian panjo and Turkish paĉjo,
and it’s still the only language
six-year-old Pipra can prattle in
to her gepatroj, her hundo or anyone else.
Initially home-schooled after
being bundled off as a baby
to Ameriko from Germanujo
she is now being relegated to
Pleasant Prairie Primary
to learn la anglan lingvon and make friends
since “a child is not a sunflower
and cannot bloom in isolation.”
Yet Pipra’s locked up
in linguistic quarantine
because she can’t comprehend “cloakroom”
or “closet” or even “please,”
and she’s as much of a blinking curiosity
as the toad in the classroom aquarium,
stared at by a lopsided ring of wide-eyed faces
that mock and giggle and spit out confusing strings of
strange nasal words that end with a thud in consonants
because kids are wicked
to the weak and the weird,
and the teacher is too overworked
to notice or care.

POEM: Small talk

BY CRYSTAL WARREN

I bump into a friend
from my hometown.

We chat, casually
and then she asks:

“Is your mother
still living in Walmer?”

Three months later
I still struggle to say

that she is
not living.