The past clicks us into focus.
There’s a slid-hinge to the edit.
In this photo, your father frames you
like a fish he wants to remember—
slipped and tin, temporarily pliable,
propped on his knee.
Why are you so sad, Girl, the fishermen ask.
As a colander drains, as shoes to feet,
as he who smokes will invariably say yes to coffee,
so a girl watching a group of gulls must be a soul in torment
or lack company, or maybe a rod,
the technology to stave off loneliness.
You are a tortoise in a hard hat.
I am a heart growing gallons and gallons of hair.
You made it with me: a perfect love,
which went hard from the softness of its innards.
And though all the love went elsewhere, you hung around,
like a gas, like sand in my bikini pants.
Katharine Kilalea is the author of One Eye’d Leigh, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writeers under 30.
By VONANI BILA
Old, frail & with an unsteady gait
charlatans drag you to an election rally
somewhere in a stadium in port elizabeth
somewhere in a stadium in johannesburg
By VONANI BILA
(after discovering that I weigh 90 kilograms before the age of 40)
chubbiness is weighing me down
like a tree that can’t carry its branches anymore
i don’t want to be brushed aside
so easily by the wind of love
like rugged absentminded sweating men
with bellies of pap, tripe & beer
from Invisible Earthquake
27th May, 00h44
I write to keep you alive.
I write to resist killing myself
In little do-able ways,
Lose days, dreaming of reunion with you.
from Requiem for This House
the father will definitely be burnt
the mother too, will be burnt
the little boys are then, already burnt
By FIONA ZERBST
Risk and aftershock,
this love
that leaps desire.
By FIONA ZERBST
—for Vann Nath
I.
This was a school
before it was wire and silence.
Oleander
scented the sunlit courtyard.
Glass door in a glass wall,
screen of reflections, rain-
streaks, fingerprints, slips
the catch of the lock, swings
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