What I Should Have Worn at My Wedding

By LIESL JOBSON

 

Potato skins, not peach skin satin,
pills, not pearls for buttons at my wrists,
onions in my bouquet, for coming tears.

A headband of fists, not fuchsias.
The lilies should have stayed in the field,
calfskin slippers would have looked better
on the unslaughtered cow.

Our guests can’t take back the gifts
and I can’t unwind 15 seconds
on the clock—let alone 15 years.

Last week the diamond fell from my ring
while I watched shopping centre clowns
and the cleaner swept it away with popcorn
like so much confetti.

 

 

Liesl Jobson is a writer, photographer, and musician living in Cape Town.

Click here to purchase Issue 04

What I Should Have Worn at My Wedding

Related Posts

Glass: Five Sonnets

MONIKA CASSEL
In ’87 I see guardsmen walk their AK-47s / on the platforms. The trains slow down but never stop. I think, / my mother was born in such a different Germany, but this is true for everyone / —so why can’t I stop looking?

cover of "Civilians"

On Civilians: Victoria Kelly Interviews Jehanne Dubrow

JEHANNE DUBROW
Now we live in North Texas, hours away from the nearest shore. And yet, the massive amounts of open space—all the prairie, marsh, and plains that we have here—started to feel like another kind of vast water, another great expanse of distance and isolation.

Lizard perched on a piece of wood.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Before learning to walk / and before I’d fallen upon the wet earth / already my heart hummed in three tones. / Even when my steps were still clumsy, / I already held three consciousnesses. // Long before my baptism, / already my three nahuals were running