Alabaster Being

I always wondered what you were made of

• beneath your skin, were you alabaster?
• Soil?
• Ocean. A flowing movement of
• quick rooted mountain.
• Or oatmeal. Scattered.

• Grout. Plaster. Rubber. Paste.
• Cinders and fragments.
• Powder.
• Clay. Loam. Gravel –

• Pottery. It must be pottery.

• A broken pile of neatness. Of orderly silence.
• Moving and pushing

• and it smells like rain.

• Your bits and pieces
• are confused and easy

• but I
• know you.
• I know.
• I know your glorious green
• buttoned up plant of
• unconstrained yet
• unexpressed frenzy.

What if I watered you with my tears?

Formed By Scissors

you and I were

cut from this

thin paper.

 

we were shaped

by scissors

pressed flat and

stretched out.

 

the scraps that

formed us are scattered

across the floor

 

and remind us of

the dizzying journey

we took

to get here.

you and I were –

Brother

My brother walked in and

like a child he asked:

“What presents did you bring me?”

All he had received the entire day

was a handshake.

Brother

My brother walked in and

like a child he asked:

“What presents did you bring me?”

All he had received the entire day

was a handshake.

The Cat

Tomorrow morning, you will discover
that your cat is dead.

Lying stretched out in the road, with a trail of
blood from his mouth.

Tell your daughter I’m sorry.

Two Dwelling Places

My heart has two dwelling places. One
I built myself and the other
someone else built when he came to live there.

The one is a rainforest.
Everything is green and
the trees are huge.

There’s untold space.
It’s quiet. It rains.
And this rain runs deep.

The other is a rabbit hole. Everything
is dull and I get sand in my mouth.
It’s dark.

For some reason, I choose the rabbit hole every day.
In the rainforest, I surrender.
In the rabbit hole, I disintegrate.

Forgetting

Moving for the sake of motion.

Skinned,
stolen washing,
a fight in the garden.

10. I remember forcing myself to forget about the time my Jack Russell was killed. She was skinned by the neighbour’s dog.

8. I forgot to lock the back garden gate. Someone got in and stole all our washing off the line.

17. Ouma used to grab us by the ears for things like fighting in the garden and messing her kitchen floor with old guavas.

3. I don’t recall enjoying the beach after my brother buried me in the sand and told me he would leave me for the crabs to eat.

5. Someone reminded me of the car guard named “Peace”. Pronounced “piss”.

14. Mom asked me to please forget about the time she cut off all my hair. It was over 10 years ago for heaven’s sake.

20. The boy in grade two showed me his privates. I felt sick.

12. I so desperately wanted to forget about the boy who said he was afraid of me and that I brought out the worst in him.

Leaning into the wind
I am child
screaming with all her might.

Thabi

They came and lowered the box
to its premature place.
Sand thrown to cover him.

The old man behind me
leaned on his cane,
took off his hat
and held it to his chest.

Thirty seconds
down the dirt road
four men at work digging
a new grave.

The sound of a spade hitting hollow earth
and then dragging across stones
mixed with singing voices

and tears.

Unhinged

Over the next couple weeks, I will be posting some of the poems I’ve been working on this semester. I have loved learning and being stretched in this form of writing. I had one the most inspiring and graceful lecturers walk with me and guide me gently as I learned how to write better. He didn’t change my writing to sound like his own. What he did was draw my own voice out and teach me to dig deeper. I came out sounding more like myself than ever before. I am so thankful.

This one is called Unhinged.

sometimes I wonder

how I look in your eyes.

do I bend and unravel? unfurl

and crumble.

folding and folding, turning over? unhinged.

are you afraid of the earthquake beneath my skin?

the ocean behind my mouth?

do you strain to look into my eyes?

Running From Elephants

When I was 10 years old, my family and I went on a little holiday to the Kruger National Park. I’ve never really enjoyed trips like this – you spend about 11 hours in the car driving to the park, and then when you get there, you spend the rest of your trip driving around looking in trees for leopards until your neck gets stiff.

The resort that we were staying at had a curfew of 6pm and on this particular evening we were late in returning to our site. We noticed numerous cars backed up on the road which usually meant that something had been spotted. I remember my dad hanging out the window to ask a neighbouring car what was going on. It was a herd of elephants that were crossing the road and the matriarch was very unhappy.

Slowly, the cars started to reverse and leave via different routes. The matriarch really was quite hacked with us and wouldn’t let anyone pass and my anxiety was mounting. My 20 year old brother was driving the car and I was begging him to turn around like all the other responsible adults had done before us. We were the last family standing.  He insisted that the quickest way back to our site was to drive past the matriarch.

I had no faith in my brother’s driving. I was hysterical in the backseat with my mom, burying my head in the foot area and finding dust and ashes from somewhere to perform a biblical mourning. My life was over. I was only 10 and this was the last African sunset I would ever see.

I remember how my brother edged closer and closer to the matriarch; she was flapping her ears madly and swinging her trunk as she stood in the road. I also remember how my dad said laughing; “don’t stall the car now” just to upset me even more because the car was actually an automatic.

I remember as my brother pushed his foot down on the accelerator, the car pulled me back into the seat in such a way that I thought the car would disintegrate beneath me.

As we sped past the matriarch, she swung her head and huge tusks at us and charged us for a short distance. SOMEHOW we made it back to our site. Alive.

 

That night, to unwind, my mom got drunk on springboks. The drinking kind.

She turned into an Afrikaans woman and sat laughing for hours. I cried thinking she would never come back to “normal” again.

My mom was Afrikaans and drunk on the patio of our rondavel.